Progressive Skeletonization: Trimming more fat from a network at initializationDownload PDF

Published: 12 Jan 2021, Last Modified: 22 Oct 2023ICLR 2021 PosterReaders: Everyone
Keywords: Pruning, Pruning at initialization, Sparsity
Abstract: Recent studies have shown that skeletonization (pruning parameters) of networks at initialization provides all the practical benefits of sparsity both at inference and training time, while only marginally degrading their performance. However, we observe that beyond a certain level of sparsity (approx 95%), these approaches fail to preserve the network performance, and to our surprise, in many cases perform even worse than trivial random pruning. To this end, we propose an objective to find a skeletonized network with maximum foresight connection sensitivity (FORCE) whereby the trainability, in terms of connection sensitivity, of a pruned network is taken into consideration. We then propose two approximate procedures to maximize our objective (1) Iterative SNIP: allows parameters that were unimportant at earlier stages of skeletonization to become important at later stages; and (2) FORCE: iterative process that allows exploration by allowing already pruned parameters to resurrect at later stages of skeletonization. Empirical analysis on a large suite of experiments show that our approach, while providing at least as good performance as other recent approaches on moderate pruning levels, provide remarkably improved performance on high pruning levels (could remove up to 99.5% parameters while keeping the networks trainable).
One-sentence Summary: We find performance of current methods for pruning at initialization plummets at high sparsity levels, we study the possible reasons and present a more robust method overall.
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Code: [![github](/images/github_icon.svg) naver/force](https://github.com/naver/force)
Data: [CIFAR-10](https://paperswithcode.com/dataset/cifar-10), [CIFAR-100](https://paperswithcode.com/dataset/cifar-100)
Community Implementations: [![CatalyzeX](/images/catalyzex_icon.svg) 1 code implementation](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:2006.09081/code)
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