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Compression of convolutional neural network models has recently been dominated by pruning approaches. A class of previous works focuses solely on pruning the unimportant filters to achieve network compression. Another important direction is…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-10-17 Tariq M. Khan , Syed S. Naqvi , Antonio Robles-Kelly , Erik Meijering

The brain, as the source of inspiration for Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), is based on a sparse structure. This sparse structure helps the brain to consume less energy, learn easier and generalize patterns better than any other ANN. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-16 Seyed Majid Naji , Azra Abtahi , Farokh Marvasti

The discontinuous operations inherent in quantization and sparsification introduce a long-standing obstacle to backpropagation, particularly in ultra-low precision and sparse regimes. While the community has long viewed quantization as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Chengxi Ye , Grace Chu , Yanfeng Liu , Yichi Zhang , Lukasz Lew , Li Zhang , Mark Sandler , Andrew Howard

Several challenges make it difficult for sparse neural networks to compete with dense models. First, setting a large fraction of weights to zero impairs forward and gradient signal propagation. Second, sparse studies often need to test…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Nolan Dey , Shane Bergsma , Joel Hestness

Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) was proposed to reduce sharpness of minima and has been shown to enhance generalization performance in various settings. In this work we show that perturbing only the affine normalization parameters…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-20 Maximilian Mueller , Tiffany Vlaar , David Rolnick , Matthias Hein

Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) has well documented merits in enhancing generalization of deep neural networks, even without sizable data augmentation. Embracing the geometry of the loss function, where neighborhoods of 'flat minima'…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-25 Bingcong Li , Georgios B. Giannakis

Sparse Neural Networks (SNNs) can potentially demonstrate similar performance to their dense counterparts while saving significant energy and memory at inference. However, the accuracy drop incurred by SNNs, especially at high pruning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-06 Mohammad Loni , Aditya Mohan , Mehdi Asadi , Marius Lindauer

Structural neural network pruning aims to remove the redundant channels in the deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) by pruning the filters of less importance to the final output accuracy. To reduce the degradation of performance after…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-10-23 Nanfei Jiang , Xu Zhao , Chaoyang Zhao , Yongqi An , Ming Tang , Jinqiao Wang

This article proposes a sparse computation-based method for optimizing neural networks for reinforcement learning (RL) tasks. This method combines two ideas: neural network pruning and taking into account input data correlations; it makes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-11 Dmitry Ivanov , Mikhail Kiselev , Denis Larionov

Pruning on neural networks before training not only compresses the original models, but also accelerates the network training phase, which has substantial application value. The current work focuses on fine-grained pruning, which uses…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-28 Xiatao Kang , Ping Li , Jiayi Yao , Chengxi Li

In principle, sparse neural networks should be significantly more efficient than traditional dense networks. Neurons in the brain exhibit two types of sparsity; they are sparsely interconnected and sparsely active. These two types of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-30 Kevin Lee Hunter , Lawrence Spracklen , Subutai Ahmad

This paper addresses the topic of sparsifying deep neural networks (DNN's). While DNN's are powerful models that achieve state-of-the-art performance on a large number of tasks, the large number of model parameters poses serious storage and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-07 Igor Fedorov , Bhaskar D. Rao

Deep neural networks achieve state-of-the-art performance in a variety of tasks by extracting a rich set of features from unstructured data, however this performance is closely tied to model size. Modern techniques for inducing sparsity and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-02 Skyler Seto , Martin T. Wells , Wenyu Zhang

Neural networks are easier to optimise when they have many more weights than are required for modelling the mapping from inputs to outputs. This suggests a two-stage learning procedure that first learns a large net and then prunes away…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-10 Aidan N. Gomez , Ivan Zhang , Siddhartha Rao Kamalakara , Divyam Madaan , Kevin Swersky , Yarin Gal , Geoffrey E. Hinton

Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) seeks the minima with a flat loss landscape to improve the generalization performance in machine learning tasks, including fine-tuning. However, its extra parameter perturbation step doubles the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Yifei Cheng , Xianglin Yang , Guoxia Wang , Chao Huang , Fei Ma , Dianhai Yu , Xiaochun Cao , Li Shen

Pruning is a model compression method that removes redundant parameters in deep neural networks (DNNs) while maintaining accuracy. Most available filter pruning methods require complex treatments such as iterative pruning, features…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-03-28 Yue Wu , Yuan Lan , Luchan Zhang , Yang Xiang

Neural network pruning is widely used to reduce model size and computational cost. Yet, most existing methods treat sparsity as an externally imposed constraint, enforced through heuristic importance scores or training-time regularization.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-29 Zubair Shah , Noaman Khan

Recently, sparse training methods have started to be established as a de facto approach for training and inference efficiency in artificial neural networks. Yet, this efficiency is just in theory. In practice, everyone uses a binary mask to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-13 Selima Curci , Decebal Constantin Mocanu , Mykola Pechenizkiyi

Sparseness is a useful regularizer for learning in a wide range of applications, in particular in neural networks. This paper proposes a model targeted at classification tasks, where sparse activity and sparse connectivity are used to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-04-19 Markus Thom , Günther Palm

People usually believe that network pruning not only reduces the computational cost of deep networks, but also prevents overfitting by decreasing model capacity. However, our work surprisingly discovers that network pruning sometimes even…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Zheng He , Zeke Xie , Quanzhi Zhu , Zengchang Qin