Pruning artificial neural networks: a way to find well-generalizing, high-entropy sharp minima

Recently, a race towards the simplification of deep networks has begun, showing that it is effectively possible to reduce the size of these models with minimal or no performance loss. However, there is a general lack in understanding why these pruning strategies are effective. In this work, we are going to compare and analyze pruned solutions with two different pruning approaches, one-shot and gradual, showing the higher effectiveness of the latter. In particular, we find that gradual pruning allows access to narrow, well-generalizing minima, which are typically ignored when using one-shot approaches. In this work we also propose PSP-entropy, a measure to understand how a given neuron correlates to some specific learned classes. Interestingly, we observe that the features extracted by iteratively-pruned models are less correlated to specific classes, potentially making these models a better fit in transfer learning approaches

From Statistical Physics to Algorithms in Deep Neural Systems

L'abstract è presente nell'allegato / the abstract is in the attachmen

Learning Sparse Neural Networks via Sensitivity-Driven Regularization

The ever-increasing number of parameters in deep neural networks poses challenges for memory-limited applications. Regularize-and-prune methods aim at meeting these challenges by sparsifying the network weights. In this context we quantify the output sensitivity to the parameters (i.e. their relevance to the network output) and introduce a regularization term that gradually lowers the absolute value of parameters with low sensitivity. Thus, a very large fraction of the parameters approach zero and are eventually set to zero by simple thresholding. Our method surpasses most of the recent techniques both in terms of sparsity and error rates. In some cases, the method reaches twice the sparsity obtained by other techniques at equal error rates

Can we avoid Double Descent in Deep Neural Networks?

Finding the optimal size of deep learning models is very actual and of broad impact, especially in energy-saving schemes. Very recently, an unexpected phenomenon, the ``double descent'', has caught the attention of the deep learning community. As the model's size grows, the performance gets first worse, and then goes back to improving. It raises serious questions about the optimal model's size to maintain high generalization: the model needs to be sufficiently over-parametrized, but adding too many parameters wastes training resources. Is it possible to find, in an efficient way, the best trade-off? Our work shows that the double descent phenomenon is potentially avoidable with proper conditioning of the learning problem, but a final answer is yet to be found. We empirically observe that there is hope to dodge the double descent in complex scenarios with proper regularization, as a simple $\ell_2$ regularization is already positively contributing to such a perspective

EnD: Entangling and Disentangling deep representations for bias correction

Artificial neural networks perform state-of-the-art in an ever-growing number of tasks, and nowadays they are used to solve an incredibly large variety of tasks. There are problems, like the presence of biases in the training data, which question the generalization capability of these models. In this work we propose EnD, a regularization strategy whose aim is to prevent deep models from learning unwanted biases. In particular, we insert an "information bottleneck" at a certain point of the deep neural network, where we disentangle the information about the bias, still letting the useful information for the training task forward-propagating in the rest of the model. One big advantage of EnD is that we do not require additional training complexity (like decoders or extra layers in the model), since it is a regularizer directly applied on the trained model. Our experiments show that EnD effectively improves the generalization on unbiased test sets, and it can be effectively applied on real-case scenarios, like removing hidden biases in the COVID-19 detection from radiographic images

On the Role of Structured Pruning for Neural Network Compression

International audienc

LOss-Based SensiTivity rEgulaRization: towards deep sparse neural networks

LOBSTER (LOss-Based SensiTivity rEgulaRization) is a method for training neural networks having a sparse topology. Let the sensitivity of a network parameter be the variation of the loss function with respect to the variation of the parameter. Parameters with low sensitivity, i.e. having little impact on the loss when perturbed, are shrunk and then pruned to sparsify the network. Our method allows to train a network from scratch, i.e. without preliminary learning or rewinding. Experiments on multiple architectures and datasets show competitive compression ratios with minimal computational overhead