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Title: DEEP-TRIM: REVISITING L1 REGULARIZATION FOR CONNECTION PRUNING OF DEEP NETWORK

Paper content:
State-of-the-art deep neural networks (DNNs) typically have tens of millions of parameters, which might not fit into the upper levels of the memory hierarchy, thus increasing the inference time and energy consumption significantly, and prohibiting their use on edge devices such as mobile phones.
The compression of DNN models has therefore become an active area of research recently, with \emph{connection pruning} emerging as one of the most successful strategies.
A very natural approach is to prune connections of DNNs via $\ell_1$ regularization, but recent empirical investigations have suggested that this does not work as well in the context of DNN compression.
In this work, we revisit this simple strategy and analyze it rigorously, to show that:
(a) any \emph{stationary point} of an $\ell_1$-regularized layerwise-pruning objective has its number of non-zero elements bounded by the number of penalized prediction logits, regardless of the strength of the regularization;
(b) successful pruning highly relies on an accurate optimization solver, and there is a trade-off between compression speed and distortion of prediction accuracy, controlled by the strength of regularization.
Our theoretical results thus suggest that $\ell_1$ pruning could be successful provided we use an accurate optimization solver.
We corroborate this in our experiments, where we show that simple $\ell_1$ regularization with an Adamax-L1(cumulative) solver gives pruning ratio competitive to the state-of-the-art.
State-of-the-art Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) typically have millions of parameters.
For example, the VGG-16 network BID0 ), from the winning team of ILSVRC-2014, contains more than one hundred million parameters; inference with this network on a single image takes tens of billions of operations, prohibiting its use on edge devices such as mobile phones or in real-time applications.
In addition, the huge size of DNNs often precludes them from being placed at the upper level of the memory hierarchy, with resulting slow access times and expensive energy consumption.A recent thread of research has thus focused on the question of how to compress DNNs.
One successful approach that has emerged is to trim the connections between neurons, which reduces the number of non-zero parameters and thus the model size BID1
b) ; BID3 ; BID4 ; BID5 ; BID6 ; BID7 ).
However, there has been a gap between the theory and practice: the trimming algorithms that have been practically successful BID1
b) ; BID3 ) do not have theoretical guarantees, while theoretically-motivated approaches have been less competitive compared to the heuristics-based approaches BID5 , and often relies on stringent distributional assumption such as Gaussian-distributed matrices which might not hold in practice.
With a better theoretical understanding, we might be able to answer how much pruning one can achieve via different approaches on different tasks, and moreover when a given pruning approach might or might not work.
Indeed, as we discuss in our experiments, even the generally practically successful approaches are subject to certain failure cases.
Beyond simple connection pruning, there have been other works on structured pruning that prune a whole filter, whole row, or whole column at a time BID8 ; BID9 ; BID10 ; ; BID12 ).
The structured pruning strategy can often speed up inference speed at prediction time more than simple connection pruning, but the pruning ratios are typically not as high as non-structured connection pruning; so that the storage complexity is still too high, so that the caveats we noted earlier largely remain.A very natural strategy is to use 1 regularized training to prune DNNs, due to their considerable practical success in general sparse estimation in shallow model settings.
However, many recent investigations seemed to suggest that such 1 regularization does not work as well with non-shallow DNNs, especially compared to other proposed methods.
Does 1 regularization not work as well in non-shallow models?
In this work, we theoretically analyze this question, revisit the trimming of DNNs through 1 regularization.
Our analysis provides two interesting findings:
(a) for any stationary point under 1 regularization, the number of non-zero parameters in each layer of a DNN is bounded by the number of penalized prediction logits-an upper bound typically several orders of magnitude smaller than the total number of DNN parameters, and
(b) it is critical to employ an 1 -friendly optimization solver with a high precision in order to find the stationary point of sparse support.Our theoretical findings thus suggest that one could achieve high pruning ratios even via 1 regularization provided one uses high-precision solvers (which we emphasize are typically not required if we only care about prediction error rather than sparsity).
We corroborate these findings in our experiments, where we show that solving the 1 -regularized objective by the combination of SGD pretraining and Adamax-L1(cumulative) yields competitive pruning results compared to the state-ofthe-art.
In this work, we revisit the simple idea of pruning connections of DNNs through 1 regularization.
While recent empirical investigations suggested that this might not necessarily achieve high sparsity levels in the context of DNNs, we provide a rigorous theoretical analysis that does provide small upper bounds on the number of non-zero elements, but with the caveat that one needs to use a high-precision optimization solver (which is typically not needed if we care only about prediction error rather than sparsity).
When using such an accurate optimization solver, we can converge closer to stationary points than traditional SGD, and achieve much better pruning ratios than SGD, which might explain the poorer performance of 1 regularization in recent investigations.
We perform experiments across different datasets and networks and demonstrate state-of-the-art result with such simple 1 regularization.
Table 5 : Per-layer Resnet-32 architecture.
There are 3 main convolutional blocks with downsampling through stride=2 for the first layer of each block.
After the convloutional layers, global pooling is applied on the spatial axes and a fully-connected layer is appended for the output.
Each set of rows is a residual block.

assistant: text: We revisit the simple idea of pruning connections of DNNs through $\ell_1$ regularization achieving state-of-the-art results on multiple datasets with theoretic guarantees.