# Network Pruning Spaces

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.09453 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09453/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis: Finding Sparse, Trainable Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03635/) (2018)
- [Neural Architecture Search with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01578/) (2016)
- [Pruning Filters for Efficient ConvNets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.08710/) (2016)
- [Designing Network Design Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13678/) (2020)
- [Rethinking the Value of Network Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.05270/) (2018)
- [Importance Estimation for Neural Network Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.10771/) (2019)
- [ThiNet: A Filter Level Pruning Method for Deep Neural Network Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06342/) (2017)
- [AMC: AutoML for Model Compression and Acceleration on Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03494/) (2018)
- [Filter Pruning via Geometric Median for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks Acceleration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00250/) (2018)
- [HRank: Filter Pruning using High-Rank Feature Map](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10179/) (2020)
- [Comparing Rewinding and Fine-tuning in Neural Network Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.02389/) (2020)
- [MetaPruning: Meta Learning for Automatic Neural Network Channel Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10258/) (2019)
- [EagleEye: Fast Sub-net Evaluation for Efficient Neural Network Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02491/) (2020)
- [On Network Design Spaces for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13214/) (2019)
- [Pruning Filter in Filter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14410/) (2020)
- [On the Predictability of Pruning Across Scales](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10621/) (2020)
- [Network Pruning That Matters: A Case Study on Retraining Variants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03193/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Network pruning techniques, including weight pruning and filter pruning, reveal that most state-of-the-art neural networks can be accelerated without a significant performance drop. This work focuses on filter pruning which enables accelerated inference with any off-the-shelf deep learning library and hardware. We propose the concept of network pruning spaces that parametrize populations of subnetwork architectures. Based on this concept, we explore the structure aspect of subnetworks that result in minimal loss of accuracy in different pruning regimes and arrive at a series of observations by comparing subnetwork distributions. We conjecture through empirical studies that there exists an optimal FLOPs-to-parameter-bucket ratio related to the design of original network in a pruning regime. Statistically, the structure of a winning subnetwork guarantees an approximately optimal ratio in this regime. Upon our conjectures, we further refine the initial pruning space to reduce the cost of searching a good subnetwork architecture. Our experimental results on ImageNet show that the subnetwork we found is superior to those from the state-of-the-art pruning methods under comparable FLOPs.