# Pruning vs Quantization: Which is Better?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.02973 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02973/

## Key facts

- Cited by 46 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 68 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Jul 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [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)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [Deep Compression: Compressing Deep Neural Networks with Pruning, Trained Quantization and Huffman Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.00149/) (2015)
- [The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis: Finding Sparse, Trainable Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03635/) (2018)
- [Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05587/) (2017)
- [Learning both Weights and Connections for Efficient Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02626/) (2015)
- [Searching for MobileNetV3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02244/) (2019)
- [Quantization and Training of Neural Networks for Efficient Integer-Arithmetic-Only Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05877/) (2017)
- [SparseGPT: Massive Language Models Can Be Accurately Pruned in One-Shot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00774/) (2023)
- [EfficientDet: Scalable and Efficient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09070/) (2019)
- [SNIP: Single-shot Network Pruning based on Connection Sensitivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02340/) (2018)
- [Channel Pruning for Accelerating Very Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06168/) (2017)
- [Learned Step Size Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.08153/) (2019)
- [Up or Down? Adaptive Rounding for Post-Training Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10568/) (2020)
- [To prune, or not to prune: exploring the efficacy of pruning for model compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.01878/) (2017)
- [Learning Sparse Neural Networks through L0 Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.01312/) (2017)
- [What is the State of Neural Network Pruning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03033/) (2020)
- [DoReFa-Net: Training Low Bitwidth Convolutional Neural Networks with Low Bitwidth Gradients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06160/) (2016)
- [BRECQ: Pushing the Limit of Post-Training Quantization by Block Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05426/) (2021)
- [The State of Sparsity in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09574/) (2019)
- [A White Paper on Neural Network Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08295/) (2021)
- [PACT: Parameterized Clipping Activation for Quantized Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06085/) (2018)
- [HAWQ: Hessian AWare Quantization of Neural Networks with Mixed-Precision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03696/) (2019)
- [Deep Learning with Limited Numerical Precision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.02551/) (2015)
- [Data-Free Quantization Through Weight Equalization and Bias Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04721/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [On the Impact of Calibration Data in Post-training Quantization and Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09755/) (2023)
- [MicroScopiQ: Accelerating Foundational Models through Outlier-Aware Microscaling Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05282/) (2024)
- [Can Large Language Models Understand Context?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00858/) (2024)
- [Effective Interplay between Sparsity and Quantization: From Theory to Practice](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20935/) (2024)
- [Learning from Students: Applying t-Distributions to Explore Accurate and Efficient Formats for LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03103/) (2024)
- [ESPACE: Dimensionality Reduction of Activations for Model Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05437/) (2024)
- [SQAP-VLA: A Synergistic Quantization-Aware Pruning Framework for High-Performance Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09090/) (2025)
- [Pruning By Explaining Revisited: Optimizing Attribution Methods to Prune CNNs and Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12568/) (2024)
- [Efficient LLM Inference using Dynamic Input Pruning and Cache-Aware Masking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01380/) (2024)
- [Surgical Scene Understanding in the Era of Foundation AI Models: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14886/) (2025)
- [On the Limitations of Language Targeted Pruning: Investigating the Calibration Language Impact in Multilingual LLM Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14398/) (2024)
- [MATCH: Model-Aware TVM-based Compilation for Heterogeneous Edge Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08855/) (2024)
- [From Tiny Machine Learning to Tiny Deep Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18927/) (2025)
- [SpikeBottleNet: Spike-Driven Feature Compression Architecture for Edge-Cloud Co-Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08673/) (2024)
- [RSQ: Learning from Important Tokens Leads to Better Quantized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01820/) (2025)
- [ProfilingAgent: Profiling-Guided Agentic Reasoning for Adaptive Model Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.05584/) (2025)
- [LoPRo: Enhancing Low-Rank Quantization via Permuted Block-Wise Rotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.19675/) (2026)
- [Leveraging language models for summarizing mental state examinations: A comprehensive evaluation and dataset release](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20145/) (2024)
- [How to Parameterize Asymmetric Quantization Ranges for Quantization-Aware Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16898/) (2024)
- [Information-Bottleneck Driven Binary Neural Network for Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.03504/) (2025)
- [On the Interaction of Compressibility and Adversarial Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.17725/) (2025)
- [Explaining How Quantization Disparately Skews a Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.07222/) (2025)
- [FLRQ: Faster LLM Quantization with Flexible Low-Rank Matrix Sketching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.05684/) (2026)
- [An Empirical Study of the Influence of Adversarial Fine-Tuning on Compressed Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09441/) (2024)
- [Predicting Probabilities of Error to Combine Quantization and Early Exiting: QuEE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14404/) (2024)
- [BitQ: Tailoring Block Floating Point Precision for Improved DNN Efficiency on Resource-Constrained Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17093/) (2024)
- [On the Impact of White-box Deployment Strategies for Edge AI on Latency and Model Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00907/) (2024)
- [Advanced Knowledge Transfer: Refined Feature Distillation for Zero-Shot Quantization in Edge Computing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19125/) (2024)
- [NoWag: A Unified Framework for Shape Preserving Compression of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14569/) (2025)
- [Frustratingly Easy Task-aware Pruning for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.22489/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Neural network pruning and quantization techniques are almost as old as neural networks themselves. However, to date only ad-hoc comparisons between the two have been published. In this paper, we set out to answer the question on which is better: neural network quantization or pruning? By answering this question, we hope to inform design decisions made on neural network hardware going forward. We provide an extensive comparison between the two techniques for compressing deep neural networks. First, we give an analytical comparison of expected quantization and pruning error for general data distributions. Then, we provide lower bounds for the per-layer pruning and quantization error in trained networks, and compare these to empirical error after optimization. Finally, we provide an extensive experimental comparison for training 8 large-scale models on 3 tasks. Our results show that in most cases quantization outperforms pruning. Only in some scenarios with very high compression ratio, pruning might be beneficial from an accuracy standpoint.