# Visual Prompting Upgrades Neural Network Sparsification: A Data-Model Perspective

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.01397 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01397/

## Key facts

- Cited by 23 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 63 of its 84 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 63)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07682/) (2022)
- [Deep Compression: Compressing Deep Neural Networks with Pruning, Trained Quantization and Huffman Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.00149/) (2015)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis: Finding Sparse, Trainable Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03635/) (2018)
- [Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13586/) (2021)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12119/) (2022)
- [Conditional Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05557/) (2022)
- [SparseGPT: Massive Language Models Can Be Accurately Pruned in One-Shot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00774/) (2023)
- [How Can We Know What Language Models Know?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12543/) (2019)
- [LLM.int8(): 8-bit Matrix Multiplication for Transformers at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.07339/) (2022)
- [Few-Shot Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning is Better and Cheaper than In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05638/) (2022)
- [SNIP: Single-shot Network Pruning based on Connection Sensitivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02340/) (2018)
- [A Simple and Effective Pruning Approach for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11695/) (2023)
- [P-Tuning v2: Prompt Tuning Can Be Comparable to Fine-tuning Universally Across Scales and Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07602/) (2021)
- [Learning Efficient Convolutional Networks through Network Slimming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.06519/) (2017)
- [To prune, or not to prune: exploring the efficacy of pruning for model compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.01878/) (2017)
- [ZeroQuant: Efficient and Affordable Post-Training Quantization for Large-Scale Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01861/) (2022)
- [Rigging the Lottery: Making All Tickets Winners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11134/) (2019)
- [Pruning neural networks without any data by iteratively conserving synaptic flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05467/) (2020)
- [The State of Sparsity in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09574/) (2019)
- [Movement Pruning: Adaptive Sparsity by Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.07683/) (2020)
- [Scalable Training of Artificial Neural Networks with Adaptive Sparse Connectivity inspired by Network Science](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.04780/) (2017)
- [The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis for Pre-trained BERT Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12223/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Learning from Teaching Regularization: Generalizable Correlations Should be Easy to Imitate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02769/) (2024)
- [APEER: Automatic Prompt Engineering Enhances Large Language Model Reranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14449/) (2024)
- [Optimizing Automated Picking Systems in Warehouse Robots Using Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16633/) (2024)
- [Image anomaly detection and prediction scheme based on SSA optimized ResNet50-BiGRU model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13987/) (2024)
- [LoR-VP: Low-Rank Visual Prompting for Efficient Vision Model Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.00896/) (2025)
- [Predicting Stock Prices with FinBERT-LSTM: Integrating News Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16150/) (2024)
- [Cross-border Commodity Pricing Strategy Optimization via Mixed Neural Network for Time Series Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12115/) (2024)
- [Deep Analysis of Time Series Data for Smart Grid Startup Strategies: A Transformer-LSTM-PSO Model Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12129/) (2024)
- [Attention Consistency for LLMs Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17178/) (2025)
- [Advanced User Credit Risk Prediction Model using LightGBM, XGBoost and Tabnet with SMOTEENN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03497/) (2024)
- [Advanced AI Framework for Enhanced Detection and Assessment of Abdominal Trauma: Integrating 3D Segmentation with 2D CNN and RNN Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16165/) (2024)
- [Recording Brain Activity While Listening to Music Using Wearable EEG Devices Combined with Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12124/) (2024)
- [LED: LLM Enhanced Open-Vocabulary Object Detection without Human Curated Data Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13794/) (2025)
- [Deep Learning in Medical Image Classification from MRI-based Brain Tumor Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00636/) (2024)
- [LTPNet Integration of Deep Learning and Environmental Decision Support Systems for Renewable Energy Demand Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15286/) (2024)
- [In-Trajectory Inverse Reinforcement Learning: Learn Incrementally Before An Ongoing Trajectory Terminates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15612/) (2024)
- [IoT-Based 3D Pose Estimation and Motion Optimization for Athletes: Application of C3D and OpenPose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.12676/) (2024)
- [TRIZ Method for Urban Building Energy Optimization: GWO-SARIMA-LSTM Forecasting model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15283/) (2024)
- [Enhanced Credit Score Prediction Using Ensemble Deep Learning Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00256/) (2024)
- [A Self-guided Multimodal Approach to Enhancing Graph Representation Learning for Alzheimer's Diseases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06212/) (2024)
- [Invisible Watermarks, Visible Gains: Steering Machine Unlearning with Bi-Level Watermarking Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10065/) (2025)
- [International Trade Flow Prediction with Bilateral Trade Provisions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13698/) (2024)
- [ES-VP : Energy-Shaped Dynamic Visual Prompting for Efficient Model Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.21194/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The rapid development of large-scale deep learning models questions the affordability of hardware platforms, which necessitates the pruning to reduce their computational and memory footprints. Sparse neural networks as the product, have demonstrated numerous favorable benefits like low complexity, undamaged generalization, etc. Most of the prominent pruning strategies are invented from a model-centric perspective, focusing on searching and preserving crucial weights by analyzing network topologies. However, the role of data and its interplay with model-centric pruning has remained relatively unexplored. In this research, we introduce a novel data-model co-design perspective: to promote superior weight sparsity by learning important model topology and adequate input data in a synergetic manner. Specifically, customized Visual Prompts are mounted to upgrade neural Network sparsification in our proposed VPNs framework. As a pioneering effort, this paper conducts systematic investigations about the impact of different visual prompts on model pruning and suggests an effective joint optimization approach. Extensive experiments with 3 network architectures and 8 datasets evidence the substantial performance improvements from VPNs over existing start-of-the-art pruning algorithms. Furthermore, we find that subnetworks discovered by VPNs from pre-trained models enjoy better transferability across diverse downstream scenarios. These insights shed light on new promising possibilities of data-model co-designs for vision model sparsification.