# Meta Pruning via Graph Metanetworks : A Universal Meta Learning Framework for Network Pruning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12041 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12041/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 66 of its 87 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 66)

- [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)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Neural Message Passing for Quantum Chemistry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01212/) (2017)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.00596/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Deep Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06114/) (2017)
- [Pruning Filters for Efficient ConvNets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.08710/) (2016)
- [Meta-Learning in Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05439/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Deep Learning in Neural Networks: An Overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1404.7828/) (2014)
- [Channel Pruning for Accelerating Very Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06168/) (2017)
- [LLM-Pruner: On the Structural Pruning of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11627/) (2023)
- [Learning Structured Sparsity in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03665/) (2016)
- [Importance Estimation for Neural Network Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.10771/) (2019)
- [Principal Neighbourhood Aggregation for Graph Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05718/) (2020)
- [Sheared LLaMA: Accelerating Language Model Pre-training via Structured Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06694/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Invariant and Equivariant Graph Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.09902/) (2018)
- [Soft Filter Pruning for Accelerating Deep Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06866/) (2018)
- [HRank: Filter Pruning using High-Rank Feature Map](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10179/) (2020)
- [NISP: Pruning Networks using Neuron Importance Score Propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05908/) (2017)
- [MetaPruning: Meta Learning for Automatic Neural Network Channel Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10258/) (2019)
- [DepGraph: Towards Any Structural Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12900/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [CrossGMN: Graph Metanetworks for Cross-Architecture Weight-Space Transformations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.01649/) (2026)
- [Graph Metanetworks for Transformer Based Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.18471/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose an entirely new meta-learning framework for network pruning. It is a general framework that can be theoretically applied to almost all types of networks with all kinds of pruning and has great generality and transferability. Experiments have shown that it can achieve outstanding results on many popular and representative pruning tasks (including both CNNs and Transformers). Unlike all prior works that either rely on fixed, hand-crafted criteria to prune in a coarse manner, or employ learning to prune ways that require special training during each pruning and lack generality. Our framework can learn complex pruning rules automatically via a neural network (metanetwork) and has great generality that can prune without any special training. More specifically, we introduce the newly developed idea of metanetwork from meta-learning into pruning. A metanetwork is a network that takes another network as input and produces a modified network as output. In this paper, we first establish a bijective mapping between neural networks and graphs, and then employ a graph neural network as our metanetwork. We train a metanetwork that learns the pruning strategy automatically and can transform a network that is hard to prune into another network that is much easier to prune. Once the metanetwork is trained, our pruning needs nothing more than a feedforward through the metanetwork and some standard finetuning to prune at state-of-the-art. Our code is available at https://github.com/Yewei-Liu/MetaPruning