# A Survey on Deep Neural Network Pruning-Taxonomy, Comparison, Analysis, and Recommendations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.06767 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06767/

## Key facts

- Cited by 202 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 244 of its 354 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 244)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [HellaSwag: Can a Machine Really Finish Your Sentence?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07830/) (2019)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [Deep Learning Face Attributes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7766/) (2014)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 202)

- [Localize-and-Stitch: Efficient Model Merging via Sparse Task Arithmetic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13656/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Transformer Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05964/) (2024)
- [Quantization Error Propagation: Revisiting Layer-Wise Post-Training Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09629/) (2025)
- [Shifting AI Efficiency From Model-Centric to Data-Centric Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19147/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Token Compression for Efficient Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20198/) (2025)
- [DocPruner: A Storage-Efficient Framework for Multi-Vector Visual Document Retrieval via Adaptive Patch-Level Embedding Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23883/) (2025)
- [Efficient Fine-Tuning and Concept Suppression for Pruned Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15341/) (2024)
- [Training Compute Thresholds: Features and Functions in AI Regulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10799/) (2024)
- [Deep Weight Factorization: Sparse Learning Through the Lens of Artificial Symmetries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02496/) (2025)
- [Not All Prompts Are Made Equal: Prompt-based Pruning of Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12042/) (2024)
- [SAFT: Towards Out-of-Distribution Generalization in Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03036/) (2024)
- [Mixture of Efficient Diffusion Experts Through Automatic Interval and Sub-Network Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15557/) (2024)
- [Benchmarking Post-Training Quantization in LLMs: Comprehensive Taxonomy, Unified Evaluation, and Comparative Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13178/) (2025)
- [Astraea: A Token-wise Acceleration Framework for Video Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05096/) (2025)
- [Adversarial Pruning: A Survey and Benchmark of Pruning Methods for Adversarial Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01249/) (2024)
- [Layer-Adaptive State Pruning for Deep State Space Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02824/) (2024)
- [From Screens to Scenes: A Survey of Embodied AI in Healthcare](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.07468/) (2025)
- [FIT-Print: Towards False-claim-resistant Model Ownership Verification via Targeted Fingerprint](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15509/) (2025)
- [Gatekeeper: Improving Model Cascades Through Confidence Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19335/) (2025)
- [Continual Unlearning for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models: A Regularization Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07970/) (2025)
- [End-to-end workflow for machine learning-based qubit readout with QICK and hls4ml](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.14663/) (2025)
- [Joint Localization and Activation Editing for Low-Resource Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01179/) (2025)
- [PreciseCache: Precise Feature Caching for Efficient and High-fidelity Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00976/) (2026)
- [Efficient and Robust Speaker Diarization via Structured Pruning of Self-Supervised Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18623/) (2025)
- [The Right to be Forgotten in Pruning: Unveil Machine Unlearning on Sparse Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18725/) (2025)
- [EA-ViT: Efficient Adaptation for Elastic Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19360/) (2025)
- [Flash-VAED: Plug-and-Play VAE Decoders for Efficient Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19161/) (2026)
- [Adapt-Pruner: Adaptive Structural Pruning for Efficient Small Language Model Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.03460/) (2025)
- [NIRVANA: Structured Pruning Reimagined for Large Language Model Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.14230/) (2025)
- [Masking Teacher and Reinforcing Student for Distilling Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22238/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Modern deep neural networks, particularly recent large language models, come with massive model sizes that require significant computational and storage resources. To enable the deployment of modern models on resource-constrained environments and accelerate inference time, researchers have increasingly explored pruning techniques as a popular research direction in neural network compression. However, there is a dearth of up-to-date comprehensive review papers on pruning. To address this issue, in this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of existing research works on deep neural network pruning in a taxonomy of 1) universal/specific speedup, 2) when to prune, 3) how to prune, and 4) fusion of pruning and other compression techniques. We then provide a thorough comparative analysis of eight pairs of contrast settings for pruning and explore emerging topics, including pruning for large language models, large multimodal models, post-training pruning, and different supervision levels for pruning to shed light on the commonalities and differences of existing methods and lay the foundation for further method development. To facilitate future research, we build a curated collection of datasets, networks, and evaluations on different applications. Finally, we provide valuable recommendations on selecting pruning methods and prospect several promising research directions. We build a repository at https://github.com/hrcheng1066/awesome-pruning.