9 accepted papers
Sparsely-activated Mixture-of-Experts (SMoE) models offer efficient pre-training and low latency but their large parameter counts create significant memory overhead, motivating research into expert compression. Contrary to recent findings favouring expert *merging* on discriminative benchmarks, we f…
Dynamic Sparse Training (DST) methods train neural networks by maintaining sparsity while dynamically adapting the network topology. Despite the promise of reduced computation, DST methods converge significantly slower than dense training, often requiring comparable training time to achieve similar …
The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH) suggests there exists a sparse LTH mask and weights that achieve the same generalization performance as the dense model while using significantly fewer parameters. However, finding a LTH solution is computationally expensive, and a LTH sparsity mask does not gener…
Dynamic Sparse Training (DST) methods achieve state-of-the-art results in sparse neural network training, matching the generalization of dense models while enabling sparse training and inference. Although the resulting models are highly sparse and theoretically less computationally expensive, achiev…
In recent years, Dynamic Sparse Training (DST) has emerged as an alternative to post-training pruning for generating efficient models. In principle, DST allows for a much more memory efficient training process, as it maintains sparsity throughout the entire training run. However, current DST implem…
Sparse Neural Networks (NNs) can match the generalization of dense NNs using a fraction of the compute/storage for inference, and have the potential to enable efficient training. However, naively training unstructured sparse NNs from random initialization results in significantly worse generalizatio…
We propose a new method for creating computationally efficient and compact convolutional neural networks (CNNs) using a novel sparse connection structure that resembles a tree root. This allows a significant reduction in computational cost and number of parameters compared to state-of-the-art deep C…
Despite having high accuracy, neural nets have been shown to be susceptible to adversarial examples, where a small perturbation to an input can cause it to become mislabeled. We propose metrics for measuring the robustness of a neural net and devise a novel algorithm for approximating these metrics…
Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have recently evinced immense success for various image recognition tasks. However, a question of paramount importance is somewhat unanswered in deep learning research - is the selected CNN optimal for the dataset in terms of accuracy and model size? In thi…