Advancing Weight and Channel Sparsification with Enhanced Saliency

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Sun, Xinglong, Shen, Maying, Yin, Hongxu, Mao, Lei, Molchanov, Pavlo, Alvarez, Jose M.
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Sun, Xinglong
Shen, Maying
Yin, Hongxu
Mao, Lei
Molchanov, Pavlo
Alvarez, Jose M.
author_facet Sun, Xinglong
Shen, Maying
Yin, Hongxu
Mao, Lei
Molchanov, Pavlo
Alvarez, Jose M.
contents Pruning aims to accelerate and compress models by removing redundant parameters, identified by specifically designed importance scores which are usually imperfect. This removal is irreversible, often leading to subpar performance in pruned models. Dynamic sparse training, while attempting to adjust sparse structures during training for continual reassessment and refinement, has several limitations including criterion inconsistency between pruning and growth, unsuitability for structured sparsity, and short-sighted growth strategies. Our paper introduces an efficient, innovative paradigm to enhance a given importance criterion for either unstructured or structured sparsity. Our method separates the model into an active structure for exploitation and an exploration space for potential updates. During exploitation, we optimize the active structure, whereas in exploration, we reevaluate and reintegrate parameters from the exploration space through a pruning and growing step consistently guided by the same given importance criterion. To prepare for exploration, we briefly "reactivate" all parameters in the exploration space and train them for a few iterations while keeping the active part frozen, offering a preview of the potential performance gains from reintegrating these parameters. We show on various datasets and configurations that existing importance criterion even simple as magnitude can be enhanced with ours to achieve state-of-the-art performance and training cost reductions. Notably, on ImageNet with ResNet50, ours achieves an +1.3 increase in Top-1 accuracy over prior art at 90% ERK sparsity. Compared with the SOTA latency pruning method HALP, we reduced its training cost by over 70% while attaining a faster and more accurate pruned model.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_03658
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Advancing Weight and Channel Sparsification with Enhanced Saliency
Sun, Xinglong
Shen, Maying
Yin, Hongxu
Mao, Lei
Molchanov, Pavlo
Alvarez, Jose M.
Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Pruning aims to accelerate and compress models by removing redundant parameters, identified by specifically designed importance scores which are usually imperfect. This removal is irreversible, often leading to subpar performance in pruned models. Dynamic sparse training, while attempting to adjust sparse structures during training for continual reassessment and refinement, has several limitations including criterion inconsistency between pruning and growth, unsuitability for structured sparsity, and short-sighted growth strategies. Our paper introduces an efficient, innovative paradigm to enhance a given importance criterion for either unstructured or structured sparsity. Our method separates the model into an active structure for exploitation and an exploration space for potential updates. During exploitation, we optimize the active structure, whereas in exploration, we reevaluate and reintegrate parameters from the exploration space through a pruning and growing step consistently guided by the same given importance criterion. To prepare for exploration, we briefly "reactivate" all parameters in the exploration space and train them for a few iterations while keeping the active part frozen, offering a preview of the potential performance gains from reintegrating these parameters. We show on various datasets and configurations that existing importance criterion even simple as magnitude can be enhanced with ours to achieve state-of-the-art performance and training cost reductions. Notably, on ImageNet with ResNet50, ours achieves an +1.3 increase in Top-1 accuracy over prior art at 90% ERK sparsity. Compared with the SOTA latency pruning method HALP, we reduced its training cost by over 70% while attaining a faster and more accurate pruned model.
title Advancing Weight and Channel Sparsification with Enhanced Saliency
topic Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.03658