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Pruning Neural Networks at Initialization: Why Are We Missing the Mark?

ICLR 2021 · Architectures and efficiency › Pruning and efficient tuning · approach: Structured network pruning · 47 citations (OpenAlex)

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Measured effects reported in the paper

What was changedWhereMeasuredEffect
Use SNIP, GraSP, SynFlow, or magnitude pruning at initialization instead of random pruningNeural network pruning at initialization · Image classification at matching sparsitiesaccuracyHelped
Prune at initialization rather than after training with magnitude pruningSNIP, GraSP, SynFlow, and magnitude pruning · Image classification at matching sparsitiesaccuracyHurt
Replace each method's specific within-layer mask positions with a random shuffle, preserving layerwise sparsity (ablation)SNIP, GraSP, SynFlow, and magnitude pruning at initialization · Image classificationaccuracyNo clear effect
Randomly reinitialize the unpruned weights from the same initialization distribution (ablation)SNIP, GraSP, SynFlow, and magnitude pruning at initialization · Image classificationaccuracyNo clear effect
Shuffle SynFlow's layerwise pruning mask at extreme sparsities (ablation)SynFlow · ResNet-20 and ResNet-18accuracyHelped
Prune the weights SNIP, magnitude, or SynFlow scores as most important, retaining the least important (ablation)SNIP, magnitude pruning, and SynFlow · Image classification at initializationaccuracyHurt
Invert GraSP's score selection by pruning the weights scored as most important (ablation)GraSP · Image classification at initializationaccuracyNo clear effect
Prune using SNIP, SynFlow, or magnitude after training has begun rather than at initializationSNIP, SynFlow, and magnitude pruning · ResNet-20, VGG-16, and ResNet-18accuracyHelped
Use GraSP scores with the opposite selection direction, pruning the lowest-scored weights (ablation)GraSP · Image classificationaccuracyHelped

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