TASK DEFINITION: In this task, you are given the abstract of a research paper. Your task is to generate a summary of this abstract. Your summary should not be very short, but it's better if it's not more than 30 words.
PROBLEM: High performance of deep learning models typically comes at cost of considerable model size and computation time. These factors limit applicability for deployment on memory and battery constraint devices such as mobile phones or embedded systems. In this work we propose a novel pruning technique that eliminates entire filters and neurons according to their relative L1-norm as compared to the rest of the network, yielding more compression and decreased redundancy in the parameters. The resulting network is non-sparse, however, much more compact and requires no special infrastructure for its deployment. We prove the viability of our method by achieving 97.4%, 47.8% and 53% compression of LeNet-5, ResNet-56 and ResNet-110 respectively, exceeding state-of-the-art compression results reported on ResNet without losing any performance compared to the baseline. Our approach does not only exhibit good performance, but is also easy to implement on many architectures.

SOLUTION: We propose a novel structured class-blind pruning technique to produce highly compressed neural networks.

PROBLEM: Routing models, a form of conditional computation where examples are routed through a subset of components in a larger network, have shown promising results in recent works. Surprisingly, routing models to date have lacked important properties, such as architectural diversity and large numbers of routing decisions. Both architectural diversity and routing depth can increase the representational power of a routing network. In this work, we address both of these deficiencies. We discuss the significance of architectural diversity in routing models, and explain the tradeoffs between capacity and optimization when increasing routing depth. In our experiments, we find that adding architectural diversity to routing models significantly improves performance, cutting the error rates of a strong baseline by 35% on an Omniglot setup. However, when scaling up routing depth, we find that modern routing techniques struggle with optimization. We conclude by discussing both the positive and negative results, and suggest directions for future research.

SOLUTION: Per-example routing models benefit from architectural diversity, but still struggle to scale to a large number of routing decisions.

PROBLEM: Many biological learning systems such as the mushroom body, hippocampus, and cerebellum are built from sparsely connected networks of neurons. For a new understanding of such networks, we study the function spaces induced by sparse random features and characterize what functions may and may not be learned. A network with d inputs per neuron is found to be equivalent to an additive model of order d, whereas with a degree distribution the network combines additive terms of different orders. We identify three specific advantages of sparsity: additive function approximation is a powerful inductive bias that limits the curse of dimensionality, sparse networks are stable to outlier noise in the inputs, and sparse random features are scalable. Thus, even simple brain architectures can be powerful function approximators. Finally, we hope that this work helps popularize kernel theories of networks among computational neuroscientists.

SOLUTION:
We advocate for random features as a theory of biological neural networks, focusing on sparsely connected networks