Layer Collapse Can be Induced by Unstructured Pruning

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Liao, Zhu, Quétu, Victor, Nguyen, Van-Tam, Tartaglione, Enzo
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Liao, Zhu
Quétu, Victor
Nguyen, Van-Tam
Tartaglione, Enzo
author_facet Liao, Zhu
Quétu, Victor
Nguyen, Van-Tam
Tartaglione, Enzo
contents Unstructured pruning is a popular compression method for efficiently reducing model parameters. However, while it effectively decreases the number of parameters, it is commonly believed that unstructured pruning cannot shorten the computational critical path, i.e., the maximum number of layers traversed during forward propagation. In this paper, we study when and how unstructured pruning can yield structural effects. For rectifier-activated networks, we introduce the notion of neuron entropy, which quantifies the degree of nonlinearity utilization. We show that magnitude-based pruning naturally lowers this entropy, sometimes down to zero-entropy layers that become linearizable and can thus be removed. Building on this insight, we propose a method that leverages "unstructured" pruning to favor sparsity in low-entropy layers, enabling their complete removal. We validate the phenomenon across CNNs, Vision Transformers, and NLP models: unstructured pruning can induce effective layer removal with little or no performance degradation in over-parameterized networks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_16890
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Layer Collapse Can be Induced by Unstructured Pruning
Liao, Zhu
Quétu, Victor
Nguyen, Van-Tam
Tartaglione, Enzo
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Unstructured pruning is a popular compression method for efficiently reducing model parameters. However, while it effectively decreases the number of parameters, it is commonly believed that unstructured pruning cannot shorten the computational critical path, i.e., the maximum number of layers traversed during forward propagation. In this paper, we study when and how unstructured pruning can yield structural effects. For rectifier-activated networks, we introduce the notion of neuron entropy, which quantifies the degree of nonlinearity utilization. We show that magnitude-based pruning naturally lowers this entropy, sometimes down to zero-entropy layers that become linearizable and can thus be removed. Building on this insight, we propose a method that leverages "unstructured" pruning to favor sparsity in low-entropy layers, enabling their complete removal. We validate the phenomenon across CNNs, Vision Transformers, and NLP models: unstructured pruning can induce effective layer removal with little or no performance degradation in over-parameterized networks.
title Layer Collapse Can be Induced by Unstructured Pruning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.16890