Many neural network pruning algorithms proceed in three steps: train the network to completion, remove unwanted structure to compress the network, and retrain the remaining structure to recover lost accuracy. The standard retraining technique, fine-tuning, trains the unpruned weights from their final trained values using a small fixed learning rate. In this paper, we compare fine-tuning to alternative retraining techniques. Weight rewinding (as proposed by Frankle et al., (2019)), rewinds unpruned weights to their values from earlier in training and retrains them from there using the original training schedule. Learning rate rewinding (which we propose) trains the unpruned weights from their final values using the same learning rate schedule as weight rewinding. Both rewinding techniques outperform fine-tuning, forming the basis of a network-agnostic pruning algorithm that matches the accuracy and compression ratios of several more network-specific state-of-the-art techniques.
Scope of reproducibility: We are reproducing Comparing Rewinding and Fine-tuning in Neural Networks from arXiv:2003.02389. In this work the authors compare three different approaches to retraining neural networks after pruning: 1) fine-tuning, 2) rewinding weights as in arXiv:1803.03635 and 3) a new, original method involving learning rate rewinding, building upon Lottery Ticket Hypothesis. We reproduce the results of all three approaches, but we focus on verifying their approach, learning rate rewinding, since it is newly proposed and is described as a universal alternative to other methods. …
Network pruning is an effective method to reduce the computational expense of over-parameterized neural networks for deployment on low-resource systems. Recent state-of-the-art techniques for retraining pruned networks such as weight rewinding and learning rate rewinding have been shown to outperform the traditional fine-tuning technique in recovering the lost accuracy (Renda et al., 2020), but so far it is unclear what accounts for such performance. In this work, we conduct extensive experiments to verify and analyze the uncanny effectiveness of learning rate rewinding. We find that the reaso…
Facebook AI Research（脸书人工智能研究院）；Brown University（布朗大学）
We examine how recently documented, fundamental phenomena in deep learning models subject to pruning are affected by changes in the pruning procedure. Specifically, we analyze differences in the connectivity structure and learning dynamics of pruned models found through a set of common iterative pruning techniques, to address questions of uniqueness of trainable, high-sparsity sub-networks, and their dependence on the chosen pruning method. In convolutional layers, we document the emergence of structure induced by magnitude-based unstructured pruning in conjunction with weight rewinding that r…
Recent discoveries on neural network pruning reveal that, with a carefully chosen layerwise sparsity, a simple magnitude-based pruning achieves state-of-the-art tradeoff between sparsity and performance. However, without a clear consensus on "how to choose," the layerwise sparsities are mostly selected algorithm-by-algorithm, often resorting to handcrafted heuristics or an extensive hyperparameter search. To fill this gap, we propose a novel importance score for global pruning, coined layer-adaptive magnitude-based pruning (LAMP) score; the score is a rescaled version of weight magnitude that …
We report, for the first time, on the cascade weight shedding phenomenon in deep neural networks where in response to pruning a small percentage of a network's weights, a large percentage of the remaining is shed over a few epochs during the ensuing fine-tuning phase. We show that cascade weight shedding, when present, can significantly improve the performance of an otherwise sub-optimal scheme such as random pruning. This explains why some pruning methods may perform well under certain circumstances, but poorly under others, e.g., ResNet50 vs. MobileNetV3. We provide insight into why the glob…
The importance of learning rate (LR) schedules on network pruning has been observed in a few recent works. As an example, Frankle and Carbin (2019) highlighted that winning tickets (i.e., accuracy preserving subnetworks) can not be found without applying a LR warmup schedule and Renda, Frankle and Carbin (2020) demonstrated that rewinding the LR to its initial state at the end of each pruning cycle improves performance. In this paper, we go one step further by first providing a theoretical justification for the surprising effect of LR schedules. Next, we propose a LR schedule for network pruni…
Learning effective pruning at initialization from iterative pruning
State Key Laboratory of Robotics and Systems（机器人系统国家重点实验室）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑技术大学）；University of Liverpool（利物浦大学）
Neural network pruning---the task of reducing the size of a network by removing parameters---has been the subject of a great deal of work in recent years. We provide a meta-analysis of the literature, including an overview of approaches to pruning and consistent findings in the literature. After aggregating results across 81 papers and pruning hundreds of models in controlled conditions, our clearest finding is that the community suffers from a lack of standardized benchmarks and metrics. This deficiency is substantial enough that it is hard to compare pruning techniques to one another or dete…
Ecole Polytechnique（巴黎综合理工学院）；Télécom ParisTech（巴黎高等电信学院）；Université Paris-Saclay（巴黎-萨克雷大学）；Mines ParisTech（巴黎高等矿业学院）；PSL Research University（巴黎文理研究大学）
Following recent advances in morphological neural networks, we propose to study in more depth how Max-plus operators can be exploited to define morphological units and how they behave when incorporated in layers of conventional neural networks. Besides showing that they can be easily implemented with modern machine learning frameworks , we confirm and extend the observation that a Max-plus layer can be used to select important filters and reduce redundancy in its previous layer, without incurring performance loss. Experimental results demonstrate that the filter selection strategy enabled by a…
Finding Sparse Subnetworks in One Training Cycle via Progressive Magnitude-Based Pruning
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology（阿卜杜拉国王科技大学）；University of Jeddah（吉达大学）；King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals（法赫德国王石油矿产大学）；King Saud University（沙特国王大学）
The lottery ticket hypothesis states that sparse subnetworks exist in randomly initialized dense networks that can be trained to the same accuracy as the dense network they reside in. However, the subsequent work has failed to replicate this on large-scale models and required rewinding to an early stable state instead of initialization. We show that by using a training method that is stable with respect to linear mode connectivity, large networks can also be entirely rewound to initialization. Our subsequent experiments on common vision tasks give strong credence to the hypothesis in Evci et a…
Meta AI；MosaicML（MosaicML公司）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）；Mila（米拉人工智能研究所）
Modern deep learning involves training costly, highly overparameterized networks, thus motivating the search for sparser networks that can still be trained to the same accuracy as the full network (i.e. matching). Iterative magnitude pruning (IMP) is a state of the art algorithm that can find such highly sparse matching subnetworks, known as winning tickets. IMP operates by iterative cycles of training, masking smallest magnitude weights, rewinding back to an early training point, and repeating. Despite its simplicity, the underlying principles for when and how IMP finds winning tickets remain…
While various avenues of research have been explored for iterative pruning, little is known what effect pruning has on zero-shot test performance and its potential implications on the choice of pruning criteria. This pruning setup is particularly important for cross-lingual models that implicitly learn alignment between language representations during pretraining, which if distorted via pruning, not only leads to poorer performance on language data used for retraining but also on zero-shot languages that are evaluated. In this work, we show that there is a clear performance discrepancy in magn…
This paper presents a survey of methods for pruning deep neural networks. It begins by categorising over 150 studies based on the underlying approach used and then focuses on three categories: methods that use magnitude based pruning, methods that utilise clustering to identify redundancy, and methods that use sensitivity analysis to assess the effect of pruning. Some of the key influencing studies within these categories are presented to highlight the underlying approaches and results achieved. Most studies present results which are distributed in the literature as new architectures, algorith…
Neural Networks (NN), although successfully applied to several Artificial Intelligence tasks, are often unnecessarily over-parametrised. In edge/fog computing, this might make their training prohibitive on resource-constrained devices, contrasting with the current trend of decentralising intelligence from remote data centres to local constrained devices. Therefore, we investigate the problem of training effective NN models on constrained devices having a fixed, potentially small, memory budget. We target techniques that are both resource-efficient and performance effective while enabling signi…
As the industry deploys increasingly large and complex neural networks to mobile devices, more pressure is put on the memory and compute resources of those devices. Deep compression, or compression of deep neural network weight matrices, is a technique to stretch resources for such scenarios. Existing compression methods cannot effectively compress models smaller than 1-2% of their original size. We develop a new compression technique, DeepThin, building on existing research in the area of low rank factorization. We identify and break artificial constraints imposed by low rank approximations b…
The state-of-the-art performance for several real-world problems is currently reached by convolutional neural networks (CNN). Such learning models exploit recent results in the field of deep learning, typically leading to highly performing, yet very large neural networks with (at least) millions of parameters. As a result, the deployment of such models is not possible when only small amounts of RAM are available, or in general within resource-limited platforms, and strategies to compress CNNs became thus of paramount importance. In this paper we propose a novel lossless storage format for CNNs…
We introduce a novel framework for the estimation of the posterior distribution over the weights of a neural network, based on a new probabilistic interpretation of adaptive optimisation algorithms such as AdaGrad and Adam. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our Bayesian Adam method, Badam, by experimentally showing that the learnt uncertainties correctly relate to the weights' predictive capabilities by weight pruning. We also demonstrate the quality of the derived uncertainty measures by comparing the performance of Badam to standard methods in a Thompson sampling setting for multi-armed ba…
Duke University（杜克大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；University of Nevada, Reno（内华达大学里诺分校）；Newport High School（纽波特高中）
Modern deep neural networks (DNNs) often require high memory consumption and large computational loads. In order to deploy DNN algorithms efficiently on edge or mobile devices, a series of DNN compression algorithms have been explored, including factorization methods. Factorization methods approximate the weight matrix of a DNN layer with the multiplication of two or multiple low-rank matrices. However, it is hard to measure the ranks of DNN layers during the training process. Previous works mainly induce low-rank through implicit approximations or via costly singular value decomposition (SVD)…
William & Mary（威廉玛丽学院）；Northeastern University（东北大学）；North Carolina State University（北卡罗来纳州立大学）；MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab（麻省理工学院-IBM沃森人工智能实验室）
Mobile devices are becoming an important carrier for deep learning tasks, as they are being equipped with powerful, high-end mobile CPUs and GPUs. However, it is still a challenging task to execute 3D Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) targeting for real-time performance, besides high inference accuracy. The reason is more complex model structure and higher model dimensionality overwhelm the available computation/storage resources on mobile devices. A natural way may be turning to deep learning weight pruning techniques. However, the direct generalization of existing 2D CNN weight pruning me…
Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, DiCITS, iMUDS, DaSCI, E.T.S.I.I.T.（计算机科学与人工智能系，DiCITS，iMUDS，DaSCI，E.T.S.I.I.T.）；Department of Software Engineering, DiCITS, iMUDS, DaSCI, E.T.S.I.I.T.（软件工程系，DiCITS，iMUDS，DaSCI，E.T.S.I.I.T.）
Duke University（杜克大学）；University of California Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）
Ensemble learning has gain attention in resent deep learning research as a way to further boost the accuracy and generalizability of deep neural network (DNN) models. Recent ensemble training method explores different training algorithms or settings on multiple sub-models with the same model architecture, which lead to significant burden on memory and computation cost of the ensemble model. Meanwhile, the heurtsically induced diversity may not lead to significant performance gain. We propose a new prespective on exploring the intrinsic diversity within a model architecture to build efficient D…
Northeastern University（东北大学）；Boston university（波士顿大学）；Florida International University（佛罗里达国际大学）
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are known vulnerable to adversarial attacks. That is, adversarial examples, obtained by adding delicately crafted distortions onto original legal inputs, can mislead a DNN to classify them as any target labels. This work provides a solution to hardening DNNs under adversarial attacks through defensive dropout. Besides using dropout during training for the best test accuracy, we propose to use dropout also at test time to achieve strong defense effects. We consider the problem of building robust DNNs as an attacker-defender two-player game, where the attacker and the…
Accelerating Neural ODEs Using Model Order Reduction
Tampere University（坦佩雷大学）；Faculty of Medicine and Health Technology, Tampere University（坦佩雷大学医学与健康技术学院）；Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences, Tampere University（坦佩雷大学信息技术与传播科学学院）
DMGNN: Detecting and Mitigating Backdoor Attacks in Graph Neural Networks
Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学）；Yangzhou University（扬州大学）；University of Southern Queensland（南昆士兰大学）；Data61, CSIRO（联邦科学与工业研究组织Data61）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）
RedTest: Towards Measuring Redundancy in Deep Neural Networks Effectively
Zhejiang University of Technology（浙江工业大学）；Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）
