Sparsest Models Elude Pruning: An Exposé of Pruning's Current Capabilities

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhang, Stephen, Papyan, Vardan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Zhang, Stephen
Papyan, Vardan
author_facet Zhang, Stephen
Papyan, Vardan
contents Pruning has emerged as a promising approach for compressing large-scale models, yet its effectiveness in recovering the sparsest of models has not yet been explored. We conducted an extensive series of 485,838 experiments, applying a range of state-of-the-art pruning algorithms to a synthetic dataset we created, named the Cubist Spiral. Our findings reveal a significant gap in performance compared to ideal sparse networks, which we identified through a novel combinatorial search algorithm. We attribute this performance gap to current pruning algorithms' poor behaviour under overparameterization, their tendency to induce disconnected paths throughout the network, and their propensity to get stuck at suboptimal solutions, even when given the optimal width and initialization. This gap is concerning, given the simplicity of the network architectures and datasets used in our study. We hope that our research encourages further investigation into new pruning techniques that strive for true network sparsity.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_04075
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Sparsest Models Elude Pruning: An Exposé of Pruning's Current Capabilities
Zhang, Stephen
Papyan, Vardan
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Pruning has emerged as a promising approach for compressing large-scale models, yet its effectiveness in recovering the sparsest of models has not yet been explored. We conducted an extensive series of 485,838 experiments, applying a range of state-of-the-art pruning algorithms to a synthetic dataset we created, named the Cubist Spiral. Our findings reveal a significant gap in performance compared to ideal sparse networks, which we identified through a novel combinatorial search algorithm. We attribute this performance gap to current pruning algorithms' poor behaviour under overparameterization, their tendency to induce disconnected paths throughout the network, and their propensity to get stuck at suboptimal solutions, even when given the optimal width and initialization. This gap is concerning, given the simplicity of the network architectures and datasets used in our study. We hope that our research encourages further investigation into new pruning techniques that strive for true network sparsity.
title Sparsest Models Elude Pruning: An Exposé of Pruning's Current Capabilities
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.04075