Pruning Increases Orderedness in Recurrent Computation

Fuente: arXiv
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1. Verfasser: Song, Yiding
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Song, Yiding
author_facet Song, Yiding
contents Inspired by the prevalence of recurrent circuits in biological brains, we investigate the degree to which directionality is a helpful inductive bias for artificial neural networks. Taking directionality as topologically-ordered information flow between neurons, we formalise a perceptron layer with all-to-all connections (mathematically equivalent to a weight-tied recurrent neural network) and demonstrate that directionality, a hallmark of modern feed-forward networks, can be induced rather than hard-wired by applying appropriate pruning techniques. Across different random seeds our pruning schemes successfully induce greater topological ordering in information flow between neurons without compromising performance, suggesting that directionality is not a prerequisite for learning, but may be an advantageous inductive bias discoverable by gradient descent and sparsification.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_14747
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Pruning Increases Orderedness in Recurrent Computation
Song, Yiding
Machine Learning
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Inspired by the prevalence of recurrent circuits in biological brains, we investigate the degree to which directionality is a helpful inductive bias for artificial neural networks. Taking directionality as topologically-ordered information flow between neurons, we formalise a perceptron layer with all-to-all connections (mathematically equivalent to a weight-tied recurrent neural network) and demonstrate that directionality, a hallmark of modern feed-forward networks, can be induced rather than hard-wired by applying appropriate pruning techniques. Across different random seeds our pruning schemes successfully induce greater topological ordering in information flow between neurons without compromising performance, suggesting that directionality is not a prerequisite for learning, but may be an advantageous inductive bias discoverable by gradient descent and sparsification.
title Pruning Increases Orderedness in Recurrent Computation
topic Machine Learning
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14747