深度学习优化的最新进展表明，借助有关训练有素的模型的一些A-posteriori信息，可以通过简单地训练其参数的一部分来匹配相同的性能。这种发现从理论到应用都有广泛的影响，将研究推向方法，以识别无需查看信息开发而训练的最小参数子集。但是，提出的方法与最新性能不符，并依赖于非结构化的稀疏连接模型。在这项工作中，我们将重点从单个参数转移到整个神经元的行为，从而利用了神经元平衡的概念（NEQ）。当神经元处于平衡状态（意味着它已经学会了特定的输入关系）时，我们可以停止其更新；相反，当神经元处于非平衡状态时，我们使其状态朝着平衡状态进化，从而更新其参数。提出的方法已在不同的最新学习策略和任务上进行了测试，验证了NEQ并观察到神经元平衡取决于特定的学习设置。

深度学习优化的最新进展表明，仅仅一部分参数才能成功训练模型。潜在地，这种发现从理论到应用都有广泛的影响。但是，众所周知，找到这些可训练的子网络通常是一个昂贵的过程。这抑制了实际应用：在培训时可以找到深度学习模型中学习的子图形结构吗？在这项工作中，我们探讨了这种可能性，观察和激励为什么普通方法通常在感兴趣的极端情况下失败，并提出一种方法，该方法有可能通过减少的计算工作来培训。关于具有挑战性的体系结构和数据集的实验表明，在这种计算增益上具有算法可访问性，尤其是实现的准确性和部署的培训复杂性之间的权衡。

Many applications require sparse neural networks due to space or inference time restrictions. There is a large body of work on training dense networks to yield sparse networks for inference, but this limits the size of the largest trainable sparse model to that of the largest trainable dense model. In this paper we introduce a method to train sparse neural networks with a fixed parameter count and a fixed computational cost throughout training, without sacrificing accuracy relative to existing dense-tosparse training methods. Our method updates the topology of the sparse network during training by using parameter magnitudes and infrequent gradient calculations. We show that this approach requires fewer floating-point operations (FLOPs) to achieve a given level of accuracy compared to prior techniques. We demonstrate state-of-the-art sparse training results on a variety of networks and datasets, including ResNet-50, MobileNets on Imagenet-2012, and RNNs on WikiText-103. Finally, we provide some insights into why allowing the topology to change during the optimization can overcome local minima encountered when the topology remains static * .

由于稀疏神经网络通常包含许多零权重，因此可以在不降低网络性能的情况下潜在地消除这些不必要的网络连接。因此，设计良好的稀疏神经网络具有显着降低拖鞋和计算资源的潜力。在这项工作中，我们提出了一种新的自动修剪方法 - 稀疏连接学习（SCL）。具体地，重量被重新参数化为可培训权重变量和二进制掩模的元素方向乘法。因此，由二进制掩模完全描述网络连接，其由单位步进函数调制。理论上，从理论上证明了使用直通估计器（STE）进行网络修剪的基本原理。这一原则是STE的代理梯度应该是积极的，确保掩模变量在其最小值处收敛。在找到泄漏的Relu后，SoftPlus和Identity Stes可以满足这个原理，我们建议采用SCL的身份STE以进行离散面膜松弛。我们发现不同特征的面具梯度非常不平衡，因此，我们建议将每个特征的掩模梯度标准化以优化掩码变量训练。为了自动训练稀疏掩码，我们将网络连接总数作为我们的客观函数中的正则化术语。由于SCL不需要由网络层设计人员定义的修剪标准或超级参数，因此在更大的假设空间中探讨了网络，以实现最佳性能的优化稀疏连接。 SCL克服了现有自动修剪方法的局限性。实验结果表明，SCL可以自动学习并选择各种基线网络结构的重要网络连接。 SCL培训的深度学习模型以稀疏性，精度和减少脚波特的SOTA人类设计和自动修剪方法训练。

训练有素的神经网络的性能至关重要。加上深度学习模型的不断增长的规模，这种观察激发了对学习稀疏模型的广泛研究。在这项工作中，我们专注于控制稀疏学习时的稀疏水平的任务。基于稀疏性惩罚的现有方法涉及对罚款因素的昂贵反复试验调整，因此缺乏直接控制所得模型的稀疏性。作为响应，我们采用了一个约束的公式：使用Louizos等人提出的栅极机制。 （2018年），我们制定了一个受约束的优化问题，其中稀疏以训练目标和所需的稀疏目标以端到端的方式指导。使用WIDERESNET和RESNET {18，50}模型进行了CIFAR-10/100，Tinyimagenet和ImageNet的实验验证了我们的提案的有效性，并证明我们可以可靠地实现预定的稀疏目标，而不会损害预测性能。

Network pruning is widely used for reducing the heavy inference cost of deep models in low-resource settings. A typical pruning algorithm is a three-stage pipeline, i.e., training (a large model), pruning and fine-tuning. During pruning, according to a certain criterion, redundant weights are pruned and important weights are kept to best preserve the accuracy. In this work, we make several surprising observations which contradict common beliefs. For all state-of-the-art structured pruning algorithms we examined, fine-tuning a pruned model only gives comparable or worse performance than training that model with randomly initialized weights. For pruning algorithms which assume a predefined target network architecture, one can get rid of the full pipeline and directly train the target network from scratch. Our observations are consistent for multiple network architectures, datasets, and tasks, which imply that: 1) training a large, over-parameterized model is often not necessary to obtain an efficient final model, 2) learned "important" weights of the large model are typically not useful for the small pruned model, 3) the pruned architecture itself, rather than a set of inherited "important" weights, is more crucial to the efficiency in the final model, which suggests that in some cases pruning can be useful as an architecture search paradigm. Our results suggest the need for more careful baseline evaluations in future research on structured pruning methods. We also compare with the "Lottery Ticket Hypothesis" (Frankle & Carbin, 2019), and find that with optimal learning rate, the "winning ticket" initialization as used in Frankle & Carbin (2019) does not bring improvement over random initialization. * Equal contribution. † Work done while visiting UC Berkeley.

网络修剪是一种广泛使用的技术，用于有效地压缩深神经网络，几乎没有在推理期间在性能下降低。迭代幅度修剪（IMP）是由几种迭代训练和修剪步骤组成的网络修剪的最熟悉的方法之一，其中在修剪后丢失了大量网络的性能，然后在随后的再培训阶段中恢复。虽然常用为基准参考，但经常认为a）通过不将稀疏纳入训练阶段来达到次优状态，b）其全球选择标准未能正确地确定最佳层面修剪速率和c）其迭代性质使它变得缓慢和不竞争。根据最近提出的再培训技术，我们通过严格和一致的实验来调查这些索赔，我们将Impr到培训期间的训练算法进行比较，评估其选择标准的建议修改，并研究实际需要的迭代次数和总培训时间。我们发现IMP与SLR进行再培训，可以优于最先进的修剪期间，没有或仅具有很少的计算开销，即全局幅度选择标准在很大程度上具有更复杂的方法，并且只有几个刷新时期在实践中需要达到大部分稀疏性与IMP的诽谤 - 与性能权衡。我们的目标既可以证明基本的进攻已经可以提供最先进的修剪结果，甚至优于更加复杂或大量参数化方法，也可以为未来的研究建立更加现实但易于可实现的基线。

Neural network pruning techniques can reduce the parameter counts of trained networks by over 90%, decreasing storage requirements and improving computational performance of inference without compromising accuracy. However, contemporary experience is that the sparse architectures produced by pruning are difficult to train from the start, which would similarly improve training performance.We find that a standard pruning technique naturally uncovers subnetworks whose initializations made them capable of training effectively. Based on these results, we articulate the lottery ticket hypothesis: dense, randomly-initialized, feed-forward networks contain subnetworks (winning tickets) that-when trained in isolationreach test accuracy comparable to the original network in a similar number of iterations. The winning tickets we find have won the initialization lottery: their connections have initial weights that make training particularly effective.We present an algorithm to identify winning tickets and a series of experiments that support the lottery ticket hypothesis and the importance of these fortuitous initializations. We consistently find winning tickets that are less than 10-20% of the size of several fully-connected and convolutional feed-forward architectures for MNIST and CIFAR10. Above this size, the winning tickets that we find learn faster than the original network and reach higher test accuracy.

最近，稀疏的培训方法已开始作为事实上的人工神经网络的培训和推理效率的方法。然而，这种效率只是理论上。在实践中，每个人都使用二进制掩码来模拟稀疏性，因为典型的深度学习软件和硬件已针对密集的矩阵操作进行了优化。在本文中，我们采用正交方法，我们表明我们可以训练真正稀疏的神经网络以收获其全部潜力。为了实现这一目标，我们介绍了三个新颖的贡献，这些贡献是专门为稀疏神经网络设计的：（1）平行训练算法及其相应的稀疏实现，（2）具有不可训练的参数的激活功能，以支持梯度流动，以支持梯度流量， （3）隐藏的神经元对消除冗余的重要性指标。总而言之，我们能够打破记录并训练有史以来最大的神经网络在代表力方面训练 - 达到蝙蝠大脑的大小。结果表明，我们的方法具有最先进的表现，同时为环保人工智能时代开辟了道路。

神经网络修剪对于在预训练的密集网络架构中发现有效，高性能的子网有用。然而，更常见的是，它涉及三步过程 - 预先训练，修剪和重新训练 - 这是计算昂贵的，因为必须完全预先训练的密集模型。幸运的是，已经经过了多种作品，证明可以通过修剪发现高性能的子网，而无需完全预先训练密集网络。旨在理论上分析修剪网络表现良好的密集网络预培训量，我们发现在两层全连接网络上的SGD预训练迭代数量中发现了一个理论界限，超出了由此进行修剪贪婪的前瞻性选择产生了一个达到良好训练错误的子网。该阈值显示在对数上依赖于数据集的大小，这意味着具有较大数据集的实验需要更好地训练通过修剪以执行良好执行的子网。我们经验展示了我们在各种架构和数据集中的理论结果的有效性，包括在Mnist上培训的全连接网络以及在CIFAR10和ImageNet上培训的几个深度卷积神经网络（CNN）架构。

深度神经网络（DNN）在解决许多真实问题方面都有效。较大的DNN模型通常表现出更好的质量（例如，精度，精度），但它们的过度计算会导致长期推理时间。模型稀疏可以降低计算和内存成本，同时保持模型质量。大多数现有的稀疏算法是单向移除的重量，而其他人则随机或贪婪地探索每层进行修剪的小权重子集。这些算法的局限性降低了可实现的稀疏性水平。此外，许多算法仍然需要预先训练的密集模型，因此遭受大的内存占地面积。在本文中，我们提出了一种新颖的预定生长和修剪（间隙）方法，而无需预先培训密集模型。它通过反复生长一个层次的层来解决以前的作品的缺点，然后在一些训练后修剪回到稀疏。实验表明，使用所提出的方法修剪模型匹配或击败高度优化的密集模型的质量，在各种任务中以80％的稀疏度，例如图像分类，客观检测，3D对象分段和翻译。它们还优于模型稀疏的其他最先进的（SOTA）方法。作为一个例子，通过间隙获得的90％不均匀的稀疏resnet-50模型在想象中实现了77.9％的前1个精度，提高了先前的SOTA结果1.5％。所有代码将公开发布。

The deployment of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in many real world applications is largely hindered by their high computational cost. In this paper, we propose a novel learning scheme for CNNs to simultaneously 1) reduce the model size; 2) decrease the run-time memory footprint; and 3) lower the number of computing operations, without compromising accuracy. This is achieved by enforcing channel-level sparsity in the network in a simple but effective way. Different from many existing approaches, the proposed method directly applies to modern CNN architectures, introduces minimum overhead to the training process, and requires no special software/hardware accelerators for the resulting models. We call our approach network slimming, which takes wide and large networks as input models, but during training insignificant channels are automatically identified and pruned afterwards, yielding thin and compact models with comparable accuracy. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach with several state-of-the-art CNN models, including VGGNet, ResNet and DenseNet, on various image classification datasets. For VGGNet, a multi-pass version of network slimming gives a 20× reduction in model size and a 5× reduction in computing operations.

Structural pruning of neural network parameters reduces computation, energy, and memory transfer costs during inference. We propose a novel method that estimates the contribution of a neuron (filter) to the final loss and iteratively removes those with smaller scores. We describe two variations of our method using the first and secondorder Taylor expansions to approximate a filter's contribution. Both methods scale consistently across any network layer without requiring per-layer sensitivity analysis and can be applied to any kind of layer, including skip connections. For modern networks trained on ImageNet, we measured experimentally a high (>93%) correlation between the contribution computed by our methods and a reliable estimate of the true importance. Pruning with the proposed methods leads to an improvement over state-ofthe-art in terms of accuracy, FLOPs, and parameter reduction. On ResNet-101, we achieve a 40% FLOPS reduction by removing 30% of the parameters, with a loss of 0.02% in the top-1 accuracy on ImageNet. Code is available at https://github.com/NVlabs/Taylor_pruning.

Low-rankness plays an important role in traditional machine learning, but is not so popular in deep learning. Most previous low-rank network compression methods compress the networks by approximating pre-trained models and re-training. However, the optimal solution in the Euclidean space may be quite different from the one in the low-rank manifold. A well-pre-trained model is not a good initialization for the model with low-rank constraints. Thus, the performance of a low-rank compressed network degrades significantly. Compared to other network compression methods such as pruning, low-rank methods attracts less attention in recent years. In this paper, we devise a new training method, low-rank projection with energy transfer (LRPET), that trains low-rank compressed networks from scratch and achieves competitive performance. First, we propose to alternately perform stochastic gradient descent training and projection onto the low-rank manifold. Compared to re-training on the compact model, this enables full utilization of model capacity since solution space is relaxed back to Euclidean space after projection. Second, the matrix energy (the sum of squares of singular values) reduction caused by projection is compensated by energy transfer. We uniformly transfer the energy of the pruned singular values to the remaining ones. We theoretically show that energy transfer eases the trend of gradient vanishing caused by projection. Third, we propose batch normalization (BN) rectification to cut off its effect on the optimal low-rank approximation of the weight matrix, which further improves the performance. Comprehensive experiments on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet have justified that our method is superior to other low-rank compression methods and also outperforms recent state-of-the-art pruning methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/BZQLin/LRPET.

当前的深神经网络（DNN）被过度参数化，并在推断每个任务期间使用其大多数神经元连接。然而，人的大脑开发了针对不同任务的专门区域，并通过其神经元连接的一小部分进行推断。我们提出了一种迭代修剪策略，引入了一个简单的重要性评分度量度量，该指标可以停用不重要的连接，解决DNN中的过度参数化并调节射击模式。目的是找到仍然能够以可比精度解决给定任务的最小连接，即更简单的子网。我们在MNIST上实现了LENET体系结构的可比性能，并且与CIFAR-10/100和Tiny-ImageNet上的VGG和Resnet架构的最先进算法相比，参数压缩的性能明显更高。我们的方法对于考虑到ADAM和SGD的两个不同优化器也表现良好。该算法并非旨在在考虑当前的硬件和软件实现时最小化失败，尽管与最新技术相比，该算法的性能合理。

Neural network pruning-the task of reducing the size of a network by removing parameters-has been the subject of a great deal of work in recent years. We provide a meta-analysis of the literature, including an overview of approaches to pruning and consistent findings in the literature. After aggregating results across 81 papers and pruning hundreds of models in controlled conditions, our clearest finding is that the community suffers from a lack of standardized benchmarks and metrics. This deficiency is substantial enough that it is hard to compare pruning techniques to one another or determine how much progress the field has made over the past three decades. To address this situation, we identify issues with current practices, suggest concrete remedies, and introduce ShrinkBench, an open-source framework to facilitate standardized evaluations of pruning methods. We use ShrinkBench to compare various pruning techniques and show that its comprehensive evaluation can prevent common pitfalls when comparing pruning methods.

轻量级模型设计已成为应用深度学习技术的重要方向，修剪是实现模型参数和拖鞋的大量减少的有效均值。现有的神经网络修剪方法主要从参数的重要性开始，以及设计参数评估度量来迭代地执行参数修剪。这些方法不是从模型拓扑的角度研究的，可能是有效但不高效的，并且需要完全不同的不同数据集修剪。在本文中，我们研究了神经网络的图形结构，并提出了常规的基于图的修剪（RGP）来执行单次神经网络修剪。我们生成常规图，将图的节点度值设置为满足修剪比率，并通过将边缘交换以获得最佳边缘分布来降低曲线图的平均最短路径长度。最后，将获得的图形映射到神经网络结构中以实现修剪。实验表明，曲线图的平均最短路径长度与相应神经网络的分类精度负相关，所提出的RGP显示出强的精度保持能力，具有极高的参数减少（超过90％）和拖鞋（更多超过90％）。

在过去几年中，神经网络的性能在越来越多的浮点操作（拖鞋）的成本上显着提高。但是，当计算资源有限时，更多的拖鞋可能是一个问题。作为解决这个问题的尝试，修剪过滤器是一种常见的解决方案，但大多数现有的修剪方法不有效地保持模型精度，因此需要大量的芬降时期。在本文中，我们提出了一种自动修剪方法，该方法学习保存的神经元以保持模型精度，同时将絮凝到预定目标。为了完成这项任务，我们介绍了一种可训练的瓶颈，只需要一个单一的单一时期，只需要一个数据集的25.6％（Cifar-10）或7.49％（ILSVRC2012）来了解哪些过滤器。在各种架构和数据集上的实验表明，该方法不仅可以在修剪后保持精度，而且在FineTuning之后也优越现有方法。我们在Reset-50上达到了52.00％的拖鞋，在ILSVRC2012上的灌溉后的前1个精度为47.51％，最先进的（SOTA）精度为76.63％。代码可用（链接匿名审核）。

最近对稀疏神经网络的作品已经证明了独立从头开始训练稀疏子网，以匹配其相应密集网络的性能。然而，识别这种稀疏的子网（获奖票）涉及昂贵的迭代火车 - 培训 - 培训过程（例如，彩票票证假设）或过度扩展的训练时间（例如，动态稀疏训练）。在这项工作中，我们在稀疏神经网络训练和深度合并技术之间汲取了独特的联系，产生了一个名为FreeTickets的新型集合学习框架。 FreeTickets而不是从密集的网络开始，随机初始化稀疏的子网，然后在动态调整其稀疏掩码的同时列举子网，从而在整个训练过程中产生许多不同的稀疏子网。 FreeTickets被定义为这些稀疏子网的集合，在这种单次通过，稀疏稀疏训练中自由获得，其仅使用Vanilla密集培训所需的计算资源的一小部分。此外，尽管是模型的集合，但与单一密集模型相比，FreeTickets的参数和训练拖鞋更少：这种看似反向直观的结果是由于每个子网的高稀疏性。与标准致密基线相比，观察到惯性基因术，以预测准确性，不确定度估计，鲁棒性和效率相比表现出显着的全面改进。 FreeTickets在ImageNet上只使用后者所需的四分之一的培训拖鞋，可以轻松地表达Naive Deep EndleBe。我们的结果提供了对稀疏神经网络的强度的见解，并表明稀疏性的好处超出了通常预期的推理效率。

While machine learning is traditionally a resource intensive task, embedded systems, autonomous navigation, and the vision of the Internet of Things fuel the interest in resource-efficient approaches. These approaches aim for a carefully chosen trade-off between performance and resource consumption in terms of computation and energy. The development of such approaches is among the major challenges in current machine learning research and key to ensure a smooth transition of machine learning technology from a scientific environment with virtually unlimited computing resources into everyday's applications. In this article, we provide an overview of the current state of the art of machine learning techniques facilitating these real-world requirements. In particular, we focus on deep neural networks (DNNs), the predominant machine learning models of the past decade. We give a comprehensive overview of the vast literature that can be mainly split into three non-mutually exclusive categories: (i) quantized neural networks, (ii) network pruning, and (iii) structural efficiency. These techniques can be applied during training or as post-processing, and they are widely used to reduce the computational demands in terms of memory footprint, inference speed, and energy efficiency. We also briefly discuss different concepts of embedded hardware for DNNs and their compatibility with machine learning techniques as well as potential for energy and latency reduction. We substantiate our discussion with experiments on well-known benchmark datasets using compression techniques (quantization, pruning) for a set of resource-constrained embedded systems, such as CPUs, GPUs and FPGAs. The obtained results highlight the difficulty of finding good trade-offs between resource efficiency and predictive performance.