# Data-Driven Low-Rank Neural Network Compression

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.05787 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05787/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Jul 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [Learning both Weights and Connections for Efficient Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02626/) (2015)
- [Pruning Filters for Efficient ConvNets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.08710/) (2016)
- [Rethinking the Value of Network Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.05270/) (2018)
- [What is the State of Neural Network Pruning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03033/) (2020)
- [A Survey of Model Compression and Acceleration for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09282/) (2017)
- [Towards Optimal Structured CNN Pruning via Generative Adversarial Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.09291/) (2019)
- [Convolutional neural networks with low-rank regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06067/) (2015)
- [Revisiting Loss Modelling for Unstructured Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.12279/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Low-Rank Softmax Can Have Unargmaxable Classes in Theory but Rarely in Practice](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06462/) (2022)
- [Enabling All In-Edge Deep Learning: A Literature Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03326/) (2022)
- [Theoretical Guarantees for Low-Rank Compression of Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02766/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite many modern applications of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), the large number of parameters in the hidden layers makes them unattractive for deployment on devices with storage capacity constraints. In this paper we propose a Data-Driven Low-rank (DDLR) method to reduce the number of parameters of pretrained DNNs and expedite inference by imposing low-rank structure on the fully connected layers, while controlling for the overall accuracy and without requiring any retraining. We pose the problem as finding the lowest rank approximation of each fully connected layer with given performance guarantees and relax it to a tractable convex optimization problem. We show that it is possible to significantly reduce the number of parameters in common DNN architectures with only a small reduction in classification accuracy. We compare DDLR with Net-Trim, which is another data-driven DNN compression technique based on sparsity and show that DDLR consistently produces more compressed neural networks while maintaining higher accuracy.