SequentialAttention++ for Block Sparsification: Differentiable Pruning Meets Combinatorial Optimization
Neural network pruning is a key technique towards engineering large yet scalable, interpretable, and generalizable models. Prior work on the subject has developed largely along two orthogonal directions: (1) differentiable pruning for efficiently and accurately scoring the importance of parameters, and (2) combinatorial optimization for efficiently searching over the space of sparse models. We unite the two approaches, both theoretically and empirically, to produce a coherent framework for structured neural network pruning in which differentiable pruning guides combinatorial optimization algorithms to select the most important sparse set of parameters. Theoretically, we show how many existing differentiable pruning techniques can be understood as nonconvex regularization for group sparse optimization, and prove that for a wide class of nonconvex regularizers, the global optimum is unique, group-sparse, and provably yields an approximate solution to a sparse convex optimization problem. The resulting algorithm that we propose, SequentialAttention++, advances the state of the art in large-scale neural network block-wise pruning tasks on the ImageNet and Criteo datasets.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
Combinatorial OptimizationNetwork PruningMethods 이 논문이 사용한 방법론
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Sparse by Rule: Probability-Based N:M Pruning for Spiking Neural Networks
Brain-inspired Spiking neural networks (SNNs) promise energy-efficient intelligence via event-driven, sparse computation, but deeper architectures inflate parameters and computational cost, hindering their edge deploymen…
Separate, Dynamic and Differentiable (SMART) Pruner for Block/Output Channel Pruning on Computer Vision Tasks
Block pruning, which eliminates contiguous blocks of weights, is a structural pruning method that can significantly enhance the performance of neural processing units (NPUs). In industrial applications, an ideal block pr…
CSQ: Growing Mixed-Precision Quantization Scheme with Bi-level Continuous Sparsification
Mixed-precision quantization has been widely applied on deep neural networks (DNNs) as it leads to significantly better efficiency-accuracy tradeoffs compared to uniform quantization. Meanwhile, determining the exact pre…
QuantizationWeight, Block or Unit? Exploring Sparsity Tradeoffs for Speech Enhancement on Tiny Neural Accelerators
We explore network sparsification strategies with the aim of compressing neural speech enhancement (SE) down to an optimal configuration for a new generation of low power microcontroller based neural accelerators (microN…
Model CompressionSpeech EnhancementBLaST: High Performance Inference and Pretraining using BLock Sparse Transformers
The energy consumption of large-scale ML models is dominated by data movement, shuffling billions of parameters across memory hierarchies and data centers. Sparsification offers a principled way to mitigate these costs b…