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| Main Authors: | , , , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2026
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.05856 |
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| _version_ | 1866918432053657600 |
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| author | Orabi, Osama Zagitov, Artur Salloum, Hadi Lobachev, Viktor A. Khubiev, Kasymkhan Kholodov, Yaroslav |
| author_facet | Orabi, Osama Zagitov, Artur Salloum, Hadi Lobachev, Viktor A. Khubiev, Kasymkhan Kholodov, Yaroslav |
| contents | Neural network pruning can be formulated as a combinatorial optimization problem, yet most existing approaches rely on greedy heuristics that ignore complex interactions between filters. Formal optimization methods such as Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) provide a principled alternative but have so far underperformed due to oversimplified objective formulations based on metrics like the L1-norm. In this work, we propose a unified Hybrid QUBO framework that bridges heuristic importance estimation with global combinatorial optimization. Our formulation integrates gradient-aware sensitivity metrics - specifically first-order Taylor and second-order Fisher information - into the linear term, while utilizing data-driven activation similarity in the quadratic term. This allows the QUBO objective to jointly capture individual filter relevance and inter-filter functional redundancy. We further introduce a dynamic capacity-driven search to strictly enforce target sparsity without distorting the optimization landscape. Finally, we employ a two-stage pipeline featuring a Tensor-Train (TT) Refinement stage - a gradient-free optimizer that fine-tunes the QUBO-derived solution directly against the true evaluation metric. Experiments on the SIDD image denoising dataset demonstrate that the proposed Hybrid QUBO significantly outperforms both greedy Taylor pruning and traditional L1-based QUBO, with TT Refinement providing further consistent gains at appropriate combinatorial scales. This highlights the potential of hybrid combinatorial formulations for robust, scalable, and interpretable neural network compression. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_05856 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Neural Network Pruning via QUBO Optimization Orabi, Osama Zagitov, Artur Salloum, Hadi Lobachev, Viktor A. Khubiev, Kasymkhan Kholodov, Yaroslav Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning Neural and Evolutionary Computing 68T07 (Artificial neural networks), 90C27 (Combinatorial optimization) I.2.6; I.2.10; G.1.6 Neural network pruning can be formulated as a combinatorial optimization problem, yet most existing approaches rely on greedy heuristics that ignore complex interactions between filters. Formal optimization methods such as Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) provide a principled alternative but have so far underperformed due to oversimplified objective formulations based on metrics like the L1-norm. In this work, we propose a unified Hybrid QUBO framework that bridges heuristic importance estimation with global combinatorial optimization. Our formulation integrates gradient-aware sensitivity metrics - specifically first-order Taylor and second-order Fisher information - into the linear term, while utilizing data-driven activation similarity in the quadratic term. This allows the QUBO objective to jointly capture individual filter relevance and inter-filter functional redundancy. We further introduce a dynamic capacity-driven search to strictly enforce target sparsity without distorting the optimization landscape. Finally, we employ a two-stage pipeline featuring a Tensor-Train (TT) Refinement stage - a gradient-free optimizer that fine-tunes the QUBO-derived solution directly against the true evaluation metric. Experiments on the SIDD image denoising dataset demonstrate that the proposed Hybrid QUBO significantly outperforms both greedy Taylor pruning and traditional L1-based QUBO, with TT Refinement providing further consistent gains at appropriate combinatorial scales. This highlights the potential of hybrid combinatorial formulations for robust, scalable, and interpretable neural network compression. |
| title | Neural Network Pruning via QUBO Optimization |
| topic | Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning Neural and Evolutionary Computing 68T07 (Artificial neural networks), 90C27 (Combinatorial optimization) I.2.6; I.2.10; G.1.6 |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.05856 |