# Spectral Complex Autoencoder Pruning: A Fidelity-Guided Criterion for Extreme Structured Channel Compression

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09352 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.09352/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 51 of its 72 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
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- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Implicit Neural Representations with Periodic Activation Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09661/) (2020)
- [Fourier Features Let Networks Learn High Frequency Functions in Low Dimensional Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10739/) (2020)
- [Learning both Weights and Connections for Efficient Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02626/) (2015)
- [Similarity of Neural Network Representations Revisited](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00414/) (2019)
- [FitNets: Hints for Thin Deep Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6550/) (2014)
- [Pruning Filters for Efficient ConvNets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.08710/) (2016)
- [Paying More Attention to Attention: Improving the Performance of Convolutional Neural Networks via Attention Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03928/) (2016)
- [Deep Variational Information Bottleneck](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00410/) (2016)
- [SNIP: Single-shot Network Pruning based on Connection Sensitivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02340/) (2018)
- [Optimizing Neural Networks with Kronecker-factored Approximate Curvature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.05671/) (2015)
- [Channel Pruning for Accelerating Very Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06168/) (2017)
- [Learning Efficient Convolutional Networks through Network Slimming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.06519/) (2017)
- [What is the State of Neural Network Pruning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03033/) (2020)
- [Learning Structured Sparsity in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03665/) (2016)
- [Rigging the Lottery: Making All Tickets Winners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11134/) (2019)
- [The State of Sparsity in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09574/) (2019)
- [Picking Winning Tickets Before Training by Preserving Gradient Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.07376/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Insights on representational similarity in neural networks with canonical correlation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05759/) (2018)
- [Soft Filter Pruning for Accelerating Deep Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06866/) (2018)
- [Exploiting Linear Structure Within Convolutional Networks for Efficient Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1404.0736/) (2014)
- [A Survey of Model Compression and Acceleration for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09282/) (2017)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose Spectral Complex Autoencoder Pruning (SCAP), a reconstruction-based criterion that measures functional redundancy at the level of individual output channels. For each convolutional layer, we construct a complex interaction field by pairing the full multi-channel input activation as the real part with a single output-channel activation (spatially aligned and broadcast across input channels) as the imaginary part. We transform this complex field to the frequency domain and train a low-capacity autoencoder to reconstruct normalized spectra. Channels whose spectra are reconstructed with high fidelity are interpreted as lying close to a low-dimensional manifold captured by the autoencoder and are therefore more compressible; conversely, channels with low fidelity are retained as they encode information that cannot be compactly represented by the learned manifold. This yields an importance score (optionally fused with the filter L1 norm) that supports simple threshold-based pruning and produces a structurally consistent pruned network. On VGG16 trained on CIFAR-10, at a fixed threshold of 0.6, we obtain 90.11% FLOP reduction and 96.30% parameter reduction with an absolute Top-1 accuracy drop of 1.67% from a 93.44% baseline after fine-tuning, demonstrating that spectral reconstruction fidelity of complex interaction fields is an effective proxy for channel-level redundancy under aggressive compression.