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arXiv · 2105.10065

A Probabilistic Approach to Neural Network Pruning

Xin Qian·Diego Klabjan
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Abstract

Neural network pruning techniques reduce the number of parameters without compromising predicting ability of a network. Many algorithms have been developed for pruning both over-parameterized fully-connected networks (FCNs) and convolutional neural networks (CNNs), but analytical studies of capabilities and compression ratios of such pruned sub-networks are lacking. We theoretically study the performance of two pruning techniques (random and magnitude-based) on FCNs and CNNs. Given a target network {whose weights are independently sampled from appropriate distributions}, we provide a universal approach to bound the gap between a pruned and the target network in a probabilistic sense. The results establish that there exist pruned networks with expressive power within any specified bound from the target network.

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Xin Qian, Diego Klabjan. 2021-05-20. A Probabilistic Approach to Neural Network Pruning. https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10065

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