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Hauptverfasser: Barbulescu, Eugen, Alexoaie, Antonio, Busoniu, Lucian
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.05349
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author Barbulescu, Eugen
Alexoaie, Antonio
Busoniu, Lucian
author_facet Barbulescu, Eugen
Alexoaie, Antonio
Busoniu, Lucian
contents Network pruning is used to reduce inference latency and power consumption in large neural networks. However, most current pruning methods rely on ad-hoc heuristics that are poorly understood. We introduce Hyperflux, a conceptually-grounded pruning method, and use it to study the pruning process. Hyperflux models this process as an interaction between weight flux, the gradient's response to the weight's removal, and network pressure, a global regularization driving weights towards pruning. We postulate properties that arise naturally from our framework and find that the relationship between minimum flux among weights and density follows a power-law equation. Furthermore, we hypothesize the power-law relationship to hold for any effective saliency metric and call this idea the Neural Pruning Law Hypothesis. We validate our hypothesis on several families of pruning methods (magnitude, gradients, $L_0$), providing a potentially unifying property for neural pruning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_05349
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Neural Pruning Law Hypothesis
Barbulescu, Eugen
Alexoaie, Antonio
Busoniu, Lucian
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Network pruning is used to reduce inference latency and power consumption in large neural networks. However, most current pruning methods rely on ad-hoc heuristics that are poorly understood. We introduce Hyperflux, a conceptually-grounded pruning method, and use it to study the pruning process. Hyperflux models this process as an interaction between weight flux, the gradient's response to the weight's removal, and network pressure, a global regularization driving weights towards pruning. We postulate properties that arise naturally from our framework and find that the relationship between minimum flux among weights and density follows a power-law equation. Furthermore, we hypothesize the power-law relationship to hold for any effective saliency metric and call this idea the Neural Pruning Law Hypothesis. We validate our hypothesis on several families of pruning methods (magnitude, gradients, $L_0$), providing a potentially unifying property for neural pruning.
title The Neural Pruning Law Hypothesis
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.05349