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Title: iSparse: Output Informed Sparsification of Neural Networks

Paper content:
Deep neural networks have demonstrated unprecedented success in various knowledge management applications.
However, the networks created are often very complex, with large numbers of trainable edges which require extensive computational resources.
We note that many successful networks nevertheless often contain large numbers of redundant edges.
Moreover, many of these edges may have negligible contributions towards the overall network performance.
In this paper, we propose a novel iSparse framework and experimentally show, that we can sparsify the network, by 30-50%, without impacting the network performance.
iSparse leverages a novel edge significance score, E, to determine the importance of an edge with respect to the final network output.
Furthermore, iSparse can be applied both while training a model or on top of a pre-trained model, making it a  retraining-free approach - leading to a minimal computational overhead.
Comparisons of iSparse against PFEC, NISP, DropConnect, and Retraining-Free on benchmark datasets show that iSparse leads to effective network sparsifications.
Deep neural networks (DNNs), particularly convolutional neural networks (CNN), have shown impressive success in many applications, such as facial recognition (Lawrence et al., 1997) , time series analysis (Yang et al., 2015) , speech recognition (Hinton et al., 2012) , object classification (Liang & Hu, 2015) , and video surveillance (Karpathy & et. at., 2014) .
As the term "deep" neural networks implies, this success often relies on large networks, with large number of trainable edges (weights) (Huang et al., 2017; Zoph et al., 2018; He et al., 2016; Simonyan & Zisserman, 2015) .
While a large number of trainable edges help generalize the network for complex and diverse patterns in large-scale datasets, this often comes with enormous computation cost to account for the non-linearity of the deep networks (ReLU, sigmoid, tanh) .
In fact, DNNs owe their recent success to hardware level innovations that render the immense computational requirements practical (Ovtcharov & et. al., 2015; Matthieu Courbariaux et al., 2015) .
However, the benefits of hardware solutions and optimizations that can be applied to a general purpose DNN or CNN are limited and these solutions are fast reaching their limits.
This has lead to significant interest in networkspecific optimization techniques, such as network compression (Choi & et. al., 2018) , pruning (Li et al., 2016; Yu et al., 2018) , and regularization (Srivastava & et. al., 2014; Wan et al., 2013) , aim to reduce the number of edges in the network.
However, many of these techniques require retraining the pruned network, leading to the significant amount of computational waste.
In this paper, we proposed iSparse, a novel output-informed, framework for edge sparsification in deep neural networks (DNNs).
In particular, we propose a novel edge significance score that quantifies the significance of each edge in the network relative to its contribution to the final network output.
iSparse leverages this edge significance score to minimize the redundancy in the network by sparsifying those edges that contribute least to the final network output.
Experiments, with 11 benchmark datasets and using two well-know network architectures have shown that the proposed iSparse framework enables 30 − 50% network sparsification with minimal impact on the model classification accuracy.
Experiments have also shown that the iSparse is highly robust to variations in network elements (activation and model optimization functions) and that iSparse provides a much better accuracy/classification-time trade-off against competitors.

assistant: text: iSparse eliminates irrelevant or insignificant network edges with minimal impact on network performance by determining edge importance w.r.t. the final network output.