Optimal Brain Apoptosis
Authors: name: Mingyuan Sun; name: Zheng Fang; name: Jiaxu Wang; name: Junjie Jiang; name: Delei Kong; name: Chenming Hu; name: Yuetong Fang; name: Renjing Xu
Published: 2025-02-25 08:03:04

Abstract: The increasing complexity and parameter count of Convolutional Neural
Networks (CNNs) and Transformers pose challenges in terms of computational
efficiency and resource demands. Pruning has been identified as an effective
strategy to address these challenges by removing redundant elements such as
neurons, channels, or connections, thereby enhancing computational efficiency
without heavily compromising performance. This paper builds on the foundational
work of Optimal Brain Damage (OBD) by advancing the methodology of parameter
importance estimation using the Hessian matrix. Unlike previous approaches that
rely on approximations, we introduce Optimal Brain Apoptosis (OBA), a novel
pruning method that calculates the Hessian-vector product value directly for
each parameter. By decomposing the Hessian matrix across network layers and
identifying conditions under which inter-layer Hessian submatrices are
non-zero, we propose a highly efficient technique for computing the
second-order Taylor expansion of parameters. This approach allows for a more
precise pruning process, particularly in the context of CNNs and Transformers,
as validated in our experiments including VGG19, ResNet32, ResNet50, and
ViT-B/16 on CIFAR10, CIFAR100 and Imagenet datasets. Our code is available at
https://github.com/NEU-REAL/OBA.