现代深度神经网络往往太大而无法在许多实际情况下使用。神经网络修剪是降低这种模型的大小的重要技术和加速推断。Gibbs修剪是一种表达和设计神经网络修剪方法的新框架。结合统计物理和随机正则化方法的方法，它可以同时培训和修剪网络，使得学习的权重和修剪面膜彼此很好地适应。它可用于结构化或非结构化修剪，我们为每个提出了许多特定方法。我们将拟议的方法与许多当代神经网络修剪方法进行比较，发现Gibbs修剪优于它们。特别是，我们通过CIFAR-10数据集来实现修剪Reset-56的新型最先进的结果。

Network pruning is widely used for reducing the heavy inference cost of deep models in low-resource settings. A typical pruning algorithm is a three-stage pipeline, i.e., training (a large model), pruning and fine-tuning. During pruning, according to a certain criterion, redundant weights are pruned and important weights are kept to best preserve the accuracy. In this work, we make several surprising observations which contradict common beliefs. For all state-of-the-art structured pruning algorithms we examined, fine-tuning a pruned model only gives comparable or worse performance than training that model with randomly initialized weights. For pruning algorithms which assume a predefined target network architecture, one can get rid of the full pipeline and directly train the target network from scratch. Our observations are consistent for multiple network architectures, datasets, and tasks, which imply that: 1) training a large, over-parameterized model is often not necessary to obtain an efficient final model, 2) learned "important" weights of the large model are typically not useful for the small pruned model, 3) the pruned architecture itself, rather than a set of inherited "important" weights, is more crucial to the efficiency in the final model, which suggests that in some cases pruning can be useful as an architecture search paradigm. Our results suggest the need for more careful baseline evaluations in future research on structured pruning methods. We also compare with the "Lottery Ticket Hypothesis" (Frankle & Carbin, 2019), and find that with optimal learning rate, the "winning ticket" initialization as used in Frankle & Carbin (2019) does not bring improvement over random initialization. * Equal contribution. † Work done while visiting UC Berkeley.

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 determine how much progress the field has made over the past three decades. To address this situation, we identify issues with current practices, suggest concrete remedies, and introduce ShrinkBench, an open-source framework to facilitate standardized evaluations of pruning methods. We use ShrinkBench to compare various pruning techniques and show that its comprehensive evaluation can prevent common pitfalls when comparing pruning methods.

While machine learning is traditionally a resource intensive task, embedded systems, autonomous navigation, and the vision of the Internet of Things fuel the interest in resource-efficient approaches. These approaches aim for a carefully chosen trade-off between performance and resource consumption in terms of computation and energy. The development of such approaches is among the major challenges in current machine learning research and key to ensure a smooth transition of machine learning technology from a scientific environment with virtually unlimited computing resources into everyday's applications. In this article, we provide an overview of the current state of the art of machine learning techniques facilitating these real-world requirements. In particular, we focus on deep neural networks (DNNs), the predominant machine learning models of the past decade. We give a comprehensive overview of the vast literature that can be mainly split into three non-mutually exclusive categories: (i) quantized neural networks, (ii) network pruning, and (iii) structural efficiency. These techniques can be applied during training or as post-processing, and they are widely used to reduce the computational demands in terms of memory footprint, inference speed, and energy efficiency. We also briefly discuss different concepts of embedded hardware for DNNs and their compatibility with machine learning techniques as well as potential for energy and latency reduction. We substantiate our discussion with experiments on well-known benchmark datasets using compression techniques (quantization, pruning) for a set of resource-constrained embedded systems, such as CPUs, GPUs and FPGAs. The obtained results highlight the difficulty of finding good trade-offs between resource efficiency and predictive performance.

由于稀疏神经网络通常包含许多零权重，因此可以在不降低网络性能的情况下潜在地消除这些不必要的网络连接。因此，设计良好的稀疏神经网络具有显着降低拖鞋和计算资源的潜力。在这项工作中，我们提出了一种新的自动修剪方法 - 稀疏连接学习（SCL）。具体地，重量被重新参数化为可培训权重变量和二进制掩模的元素方向乘法。因此，由二进制掩模完全描述网络连接，其由单位步进函数调制。理论上，从理论上证明了使用直通估计器（STE）进行网络修剪的基本原理。这一原则是STE的代理梯度应该是积极的，确保掩模变量在其最小值处收敛。在找到泄漏的Relu后，SoftPlus和Identity Stes可以满足这个原理，我们建议采用SCL的身份STE以进行离散面膜松弛。我们发现不同特征的面具梯度非常不平衡，因此，我们建议将每个特征的掩模梯度标准化以优化掩码变量训练。为了自动训练稀疏掩码，我们将网络连接总数作为我们的客观函数中的正则化术语。由于SCL不需要由网络层设计人员定义的修剪标准或超级参数，因此在更大的假设空间中探讨了网络，以实现最佳性能的优化稀疏连接。 SCL克服了现有自动修剪方法的局限性。实验结果表明，SCL可以自动学习并选择各种基线网络结构的重要网络连接。 SCL培训的深度学习模型以稀疏性，精度和减少脚波特的SOTA人类设计和自动修剪方法训练。

网络修剪是一种广泛使用的技术，用于有效地压缩深神经网络，几乎没有在推理期间在性能下降低。迭代幅度修剪（IMP）是由几种迭代训练和修剪步骤组成的网络修剪的最熟悉的方法之一，其中在修剪后丢失了大量网络的性能，然后在随后的再培训阶段中恢复。虽然常用为基准参考，但经常认为a）通过不将稀疏纳入训练阶段来达到次优状态，b）其全球选择标准未能正确地确定最佳层面修剪速率和c）其迭代性质使它变得缓慢和不竞争。根据最近提出的再培训技术，我们通过严格和一致的实验来调查这些索赔，我们将Impr到培训期间的训练算法进行比较，评估其选择标准的建议修改，并研究实际需要的迭代次数和总培训时间。我们发现IMP与SLR进行再培训，可以优于最先进的修剪期间，没有或仅具有很少的计算开销，即全局幅度选择标准在很大程度上具有更复杂的方法，并且只有几个刷新时期在实践中需要达到大部分稀疏性与IMP的诽谤 - 与性能权衡。我们的目标既可以证明基本的进攻已经可以提供最先进的修剪结果，甚至优于更加复杂或大量参数化方法，也可以为未来的研究建立更加现实但易于可实现的基线。

Many applications require sparse neural networks due to space or inference time restrictions. There is a large body of work on training dense networks to yield sparse networks for inference, but this limits the size of the largest trainable sparse model to that of the largest trainable dense model. In this paper we introduce a method to train sparse neural networks with a fixed parameter count and a fixed computational cost throughout training, without sacrificing accuracy relative to existing dense-tosparse training methods. Our method updates the topology of the sparse network during training by using parameter magnitudes and infrequent gradient calculations. We show that this approach requires fewer floating-point operations (FLOPs) to achieve a given level of accuracy compared to prior techniques. We demonstrate state-of-the-art sparse training results on a variety of networks and datasets, including ResNet-50, MobileNets on Imagenet-2012, and RNNs on WikiText-103. Finally, we provide some insights into why allowing the topology to change during the optimization can overcome local minima encountered when the topology remains static * .

We propose a simultaneous learning and pruning algorithm capable of identifying and eliminating irrelevant structures in a neural network during the early stages of training. Thus, the computational cost of subsequent training iterations, besides that of inference, is considerably reduced. Our method, based on variational inference principles using Gaussian scale mixture priors on neural network weights, learns the variational posterior distribution of Bernoulli random variables multiplying the units/filters similarly to adaptive dropout. Our algorithm, ensures that the Bernoulli parameters practically converge to either 0 or 1, establishing a deterministic final network. We analytically derive a novel hyper-prior distribution over the prior parameters that is crucial for their optimal selection and leads to consistent pruning levels and prediction accuracy regardless of weight initialization or the size of the starting network. We prove the convergence properties of our algorithm establishing theoretical and practical pruning conditions. We evaluate the proposed algorithm on the MNIST and CIFAR-10 data sets and the commonly used fully connected and convolutional LeNet and VGG16 architectures. The simulations show that our method achieves pruning levels on par with state-of the-art methods for structured pruning, while maintaining better test-accuracy and more importantly in a manner robust with respect to network initialization and initial size.

Pruning refers to the elimination of trivial weights from neural networks. The sub-networks within an overparameterized model produced after pruning are often called Lottery tickets. This research aims to generate winning lottery tickets from a set of lottery tickets that can achieve similar accuracy to the original unpruned network. We introduce a novel winning ticket called Cyclic Overlapping Lottery Ticket (COLT) by data splitting and cyclic retraining of the pruned network from scratch. We apply a cyclic pruning algorithm that keeps only the overlapping weights of different pruned models trained on different data segments. Our results demonstrate that COLT can achieve similar accuracies (obtained by the unpruned model) while maintaining high sparsities. We show that the accuracy of COLT is on par with the winning tickets of Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH) and, at times, is better. Moreover, COLTs can be generated using fewer iterations than tickets generated by the popular Iterative Magnitude Pruning (IMP) method. In addition, we also notice COLTs generated on large datasets can be transferred to small ones without compromising performance, demonstrating its generalizing capability. We conduct all our experiments on Cifar-10, Cifar-100 & TinyImageNet datasets and report superior performance than the state-of-the-art methods.

深度神经网络（DNN）在解决许多真实问题方面都有效。较大的DNN模型通常表现出更好的质量（例如，精度，精度），但它们的过度计算会导致长期推理时间。模型稀疏可以降低计算和内存成本，同时保持模型质量。大多数现有的稀疏算法是单向移除的重量，而其他人则随机或贪婪地探索每层进行修剪的小权重子集。这些算法的局限性降低了可实现的稀疏性水平。此外，许多算法仍然需要预先训练的密集模型，因此遭受大的内存占地面积。在本文中，我们提出了一种新颖的预定生长和修剪（间隙）方法，而无需预先培训密集模型。它通过反复生长一个层次的层来解决以前的作品的缺点，然后在一些训练后修剪回到稀疏。实验表明，使用所提出的方法修剪模型匹配或击败高度优化的密集模型的质量，在各种任务中以80％的稀疏度，例如图像分类，客观检测，3D对象分段和翻译。它们还优于模型稀疏的其他最先进的（SOTA）方法。作为一个例子，通过间隙获得的90％不均匀的稀疏resnet-50模型在想象中实现了77.9％的前1个精度，提高了先前的SOTA结果1.5％。所有代码将公开发布。

Neural network pruning techniques can reduce the parameter counts of trained networks by over 90%, decreasing storage requirements and improving computational performance of inference without compromising accuracy. However, contemporary experience is that the sparse architectures produced by pruning are difficult to train from the start, which would similarly improve training performance.We find that a standard pruning technique naturally uncovers subnetworks whose initializations made them capable of training effectively. Based on these results, we articulate the lottery ticket hypothesis: dense, randomly-initialized, feed-forward networks contain subnetworks (winning tickets) that-when trained in isolationreach test accuracy comparable to the original network in a similar number of iterations. The winning tickets we find have won the initialization lottery: their connections have initial weights that make training particularly effective.We present an algorithm to identify winning tickets and a series of experiments that support the lottery ticket hypothesis and the importance of these fortuitous initializations. We consistently find winning tickets that are less than 10-20% of the size of several fully-connected and convolutional feed-forward architectures for MNIST and CIFAR10. Above this size, the winning tickets that we find learn faster than the original network and reach higher test accuracy.

深度神经网络（DNN）的计算要求增加导致获得稀疏，且准确的DNN模型的兴趣。最近的工作已经调查了稀疏训练的更加困难的情况，其中DNN重量尽可能稀少，以减少训练期间的计算成本。现有的稀疏训练方法通常是经验的，并且可以具有相对于致密基线的准确性较低。在本文中，我们介绍了一种称为交替压缩/解压缩（AC / DC）训练DNN的一般方法，证明了算法变体的收敛，并表明AC / DC在类似的计算预算中准确地表现出现有的稀疏训练方法;在高稀疏水平下，AC / DC甚至优于现有的现有方法，依赖于准确的预训练密集模型。 AC / DC的一个重要属性是它允许联合培训密集和稀疏的型号，在训练过程结束时产生精确的稀疏密集模型对。这在实践中是有用的，其中压缩变体可能是为了在资源受限的设置中进行部署而不重新执行整个训练流，并且还为我们提供了深入和压缩模型之间的精度差距的见解。代码可在：https://github.com/ist-daslab/acdc。

This paper presents a method for adding multiple tasks to a single deep neural network while avoiding catastrophic forgetting. Inspired by network pruning techniques, we exploit redundancies in large deep networks to free up parameters that can then be employed to learn new tasks. By performing iterative pruning and network re-training, we are able to sequentially "pack" multiple tasks into a single network while ensuring minimal drop in performance and minimal storage overhead. Unlike prior work that uses proxy losses to maintain accuracy on older tasks, we always optimize for the task at hand. We perform extensive experiments on a variety of network architectures and largescale datasets, and observe much better robustness against catastrophic forgetting than prior work. In particular, we are able to add three fine-grained classification tasks to a single ImageNet-trained VGG-16 network and achieve accuracies close to those of separately trained networks for each task. Code available at https://github.com/ arunmallya/packnet

We propose an efficient and unified framework, namely ThiNet, to simultaneously accelerate and compress CNN models in both training and inference stages. We focus on the filter level pruning, i.e., the whole filter would be discarded if it is less important. Our method does not change the original network structure, thus it can be perfectly supported by any off-the-shelf deep learning libraries. We formally establish filter pruning as an optimization problem, and reveal that we need to prune filters based on statistics information computed from its next layer, not the current layer, which differentiates ThiNet from existing methods. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of this strategy, which has advanced the state-of-the-art. We also show the performance of ThiNet on ILSVRC-12 benchmark. ThiNet achieves 3.31× FLOPs reduction and 16.63× compression on VGG-16, with only 0.52% top-5 accuracy drop. Similar experiments with ResNet-50 reveal that even for a compact network, ThiNet can also reduce more than half of the parameters and FLOPs, at the cost of roughly 1% top-5 accuracy drop. Moreover, the original VGG-16 model can be further pruned into a very small model with only 5.05MB model size, preserving AlexNet level accuracy but showing much stronger generalization ability.

深度学习技术在各种任务中都表现出了出色的有效性，并且深度学习具有推进多种应用程序（包括在边缘计算中）的潜力，其中将深层模型部署在边缘设备上，以实现即时的数据处理和响应。一个关键的挑战是，虽然深层模型的应用通常会产生大量的内存和计算成本，但Edge设备通常只提供非常有限的存储和计算功能，这些功能可能会在各个设备之间差异很大。这些特征使得难以构建深度学习解决方案，以释放边缘设备的潜力，同时遵守其约束。应对这一挑战的一种有希望的方法是自动化有效的深度学习模型的设计，这些模型轻巧，仅需少量存储，并且仅产生低计算开销。该调查提供了针对边缘计算的深度学习模型设计自动化技术的全面覆盖。它提供了关键指标的概述和比较，这些指标通常用于量化模型在有效性，轻度和计算成本方面的水平。然后，该调查涵盖了深层设计自动化技术的三类最新技术：自动化神经体系结构搜索，自动化模型压缩以及联合自动化设计和压缩。最后，调查涵盖了未来研究的开放问题和方向。

最近对深神经网络（DNN）效率的重点已导致了模型压缩方法的重要工作，其中重量修剪是最受欢迎的方法之一。同时，有快速增长的计算支持，以有效地执行通过修剪获得的非结构化模型。但是，大多数现有的修剪方法最小化仅剩余权重的数量，即模型的大小，而不是针对推理时间进行优化。我们通过引入SPDY来解决这一差距，SPDY是一种新的压缩方法，该方法会自动确定层次的稀疏性目标，可以在给定系统上实现所需的推理速度，同时最大程度地减少准确性损失。 SPDY由两种新技术组成：第一个是一种有效的动态编程算法，用于求解一组给定的层敏感性得分，以解决加速约束的层压缩问题；第二个是一个局部搜索程序，用于确定准确的层敏感性得分。跨流行视觉和语言模型的实验表明，SPDY可以保证相对于现有策略的恢复较高的准确性，无论是一次性和逐步修剪方案，并且与大多数现有的修剪方法兼容。我们还将方法扩展到了最近实施的修剪任务，几乎没有数据，在该数据中，我们在修剪GPU支持的2：4稀疏模式时实现了最著名的准确性恢复。

The success of CNNs in various applications is accompanied by a significant increase in the computation and parameter storage costs. Recent efforts toward reducing these overheads involve pruning and compressing the weights of various layers without hurting original accuracy. However, magnitude-based pruning of weights reduces a significant number of parameters from the fully connected layers and may not adequately reduce the computation costs in the convolutional layers due to irregular sparsity in the pruned networks. We present an acceleration method for CNNs, where we prune filters from CNNs that are identified as having a small effect on the output accuracy. By removing whole filters in the network together with their connecting feature maps, the computation costs are reduced significantly. In contrast to pruning weights, this approach does not result in sparse connectivity patterns. Hence, it does not need the support of sparse convolution libraries and can work with existing efficient BLAS libraries for dense matrix multiplications. We show that even simple filter pruning techniques can reduce inference costs for VGG-16 by up to 34% and ResNet-110 by up to 38% on CIFAR10 while regaining close to the original accuracy by retraining the networks.

我们考虑在具有挑战性的训练后环境中，深度神经网络（DNN）的模型压缩问题，在该设置中，我们将获得精确的训练模型，并且必须仅基于少量校准输入数据而无需任何重新培训即可压缩它。鉴于新兴软件和硬件支持通过加速修剪和/或量化压缩的模型，并且已经针对两种压缩方法独立提出了良好的表现解决方案，因此该问题已变得流行。在本文中，我们引入了一个新的压缩框架，该框架涵盖了统一环境中的重量修剪和量化，时间和空间效率高，并且在现有的后训练方法的实际性能上大大改善。在技​​术层面上，我们的方法基于[Lecun，Denker和Solla，1990年]在现代DNN的规模上的经典最佳脑外科医生（OBS）框架的第一个精确实现，我们进一步扩展到覆盖范围。重量量化。这是通过一系列可能具有独立利益的算法开发来实现的。从实际的角度来看，我们的实验结果表明，它可以在现有后训练方法的压缩 - 准确性权衡方面显着改善，并且甚至可以在训练后进行修剪和量化的准确共同应用。

训练有素的神经网络的性能至关重要。加上深度学习模型的不断增长的规模，这种观察激发了对学习稀疏模型的广泛研究。在这项工作中，我们专注于控制稀疏学习时的稀疏水平的任务。基于稀疏性惩罚的现有方法涉及对罚款因素的昂贵反复试验调整，因此缺乏直接控制所得模型的稀疏性。作为响应，我们采用了一个约束的公式：使用Louizos等人提出的栅极机制。 （2018年），我们制定了一个受约束的优化问题，其中稀疏以训练目标和所需的稀疏目标以端到端的方式指导。使用WIDERESNET和RESNET {18，50}模型进行了CIFAR-10/100，Tinyimagenet和ImageNet的实验验证了我们的提案的有效性，并证明我们可以可靠地实现预定的稀疏目标，而不会损害预测性能。

近似贝叶斯深度学习方法对于解决在智能系统中部署深度学习组件时，包括在智能系统中部署深度学习组件的几个问题，包括减轻过度自信的错误并提供增强的鲁棒性，从而超出分发示例。但是，现有近似贝叶斯推理方法的计算要求可以使它们不适合部署包括低功耗边缘设备的智能IOT系统。在本文中，我们为监督深度学习提供了一系列近似贝叶斯推理方法，并在应用这些方法对当前边缘硬件上的挑战和机遇。我们突出了几种潜在的解决方案来降低模型存储要求，提高计算可扩展性，包括模型修剪和蒸馏方法。