# FasterAI: A Lightweight Library for Creating Sparse Neural Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.01088 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01088/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in General knowledge distillation methods, one of 12 directions in Knowledge distillation.
- Builds on 8 of its 12 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jul 2022.

## Placed in

- Knowledge distillation / [General knowledge distillation methods](https://mlsanity.com/distill/general-knowledge-distillation-methods/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis: Finding Sparse, Trainable Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03635/) (2018)
- [Linear Mode Connectivity and the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05671/) (2019)
- [To prune, or not to prune: exploring the efficacy of pruning for model compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.01878/) (2017)
- [Deconstructing Lottery Tickets: Zeros, Signs, and the Supermask](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01067/) (2019)
- [fastai: A Layered API for Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.04688/) (2020)
- [Pruning Neural Networks at Initialization: Why are We Missing the Mark?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.08576/) (2020)
- [One-Cycle Pruning: Pruning ConvNets Under a Tight Training Budget](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02086/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

FasterAI is a PyTorch-based library, aiming to facilitate the utilization of deep neural networks compression techniques such as sparsification, pruning, knowledge distillation, or regularization. The library is built with the purpose of enabling quick implementation and experimentation. More particularly, compression techniques are leveraging Callback systems of libraries such as fastai and Pytorch Lightning to bring a user-friendly and high-level API. The main asset of FasterAI is its lightweight, yet powerful, simplicity of use. Indeed, because it was developed in a very granular way, users can create thousands of unique experiments by using different combinations of parameters. In this paper, we focus on the sparsifying capabilities of FasterAI, which represents the core of the library. Performing sparsification of a neural network in FasterAI only requires a single additional line of code in the traditional training loop, yet allows to perform state-of-the-art techniques such as Lottery Ticket Hypothesis experiments