arXiv AI

Structured Neuron Pruning in Deep Neural Networks Using Multi-Armed Bandits

arXiv:2606. 07615v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep neural networks often contain redundant hidden units.

arXiv AI
Jun 12

Structured vs. Unstructured Pruning: An Exponential Gap

arXiv:2603. 02234v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The Strong Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (SLTH) states that large, randomly initialized neural networks contain sparse subnetworks capable of approximating a target function at initialization without training, suggesting that pruning alone is sufficient.

By Davide Ferre' (CNRS, COATI, UniCA, I3S), Fr\'ed\'eric Giroire (I3S, COATI, UniCA), Frederik Mallmann-Trenn (CNRS, COATI, I3S, UniCA), Emanuele Natale (CNRS, COATI, I3S, UniCA)
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

Task-Aware Hybrid QUBO Optimization for Structured Neural Network Pruning

The paper introduces a Hybrid Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) framework for structured neural network pruning that integrates task‑aware sensitivity metrics (first‑order Taylor and Weight‑Fisher) into the objective’s linear term and optionally uses activation similarity for quadratic interactions. It controls pruning cardinality via a binary search over a capacity incentive rather than an explicit penalty and further refines the pruning mask with a two‑stage QUBO–Tensor‑Train strategy that employs gradient‑free black‑box optimization. Experiments on SIDD image denoising with a Half‑UNet model demonstrate that this Hybrid QUBO outperforms Taylor and L1‑based QUBO baselines in PSNR and SSIM, while also revealing computational and deployment challenges of mask‑based pruning.

By Osama Orabi, Artur Zagitov, Hadi Salloum, Viktor A. Lobachev, Yaroslav Kholodov
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Damage-Aware Bandit Pruning for Vision and Language Transformers

The paper introduces a structured post‑training pruning method for vision and language transformers called Damage‑Aware Bandit Pruning. It treats the selection of functional units (attention heads and MLP channel groups) as a multi‑armed bandit problem, using paired damage (masked loss minus base loss) as a reward to guide either UCB or Thompson Sampling policies. Experiments on a range of models (GPT‑2, OPT, Pythia, Qwen2.5, SmolLM2, ViT‑B/16, DeiT‑Tiny, Swin‑Tiny) show that the bandit approaches generally reduce degradation compared to budgeted‑greedy baselines, with statistically significant improvements in most comparisons.

By Salem Ameen, Sunil Vadera
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 31

Beyond Binary Rewards: A Comparative Study of Reward Design for Reinforcement Unlearning

arXiv:2607. 27968v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine unlearning seeks to selectively remove specific knowledge from trained language models without full retraining, a growing necessity under privacy regulations such as GDPR and the EU AI Act.

By Efstratios Zaradoukas, Davide Gabrielli, Bardh Prenkaj, Gjergji Kasneci
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Pruning Laws for Large Language Models

arXiv:2504.04342v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Scaling up model parameters and training data consistently improves the performance of large language models (LLMs), but at the cost of rapidly gro...

By Ayan Sengupta, Siddhant Chaudhary, Tanmoy Chakraborty