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Poster
Soft Threshold Weight Reparameterization for Learnable Sparsity
Aditya Kusupati · Vivek Ramanujan · Raghav Somani · Mitchell Wortsman · Prateek Jain · Sham Kakade · Ali Farhadi

Thu Jul 16 12:00 PM -- 12:45 PM & Fri Jul 17 12:00 AM -- 12:45 AM (PDT) @ Virtual
in Poster Session 45 »

Sparsity in Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) is studied extensively with the focus of maximizing prediction accuracy given an overall parameter budget. Existing methods rely on uniform or heuristic non-uniform sparsity budgets which have sub-optimal layer-wise parameter allocation resulting in a) lower prediction accuracy or b) higher inference cost (FLOPs). This work proposes Soft Threshold Reparameterization (STR), a novel use of the soft-threshold operator on DNN weights. STR smoothly induces sparsity while learning pruning thresholds thereby obtaining a non-uniform sparsity budget. Our method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy for unstructured sparsity in CNNs (ResNet50 and MobileNetV1 on ImageNet-1K), and, additionally, learns non-uniform budgets that empirically reduce the FLOPs by up to 50%. Notably, STR boosts the accuracy over existing results by up to 10% in the ultra sparse (99%) regime and can also be used to induce low-rank (structured sparsity) in RNNs. In short, STR is a simple mechanism which learns effective sparsity budgets that contrast with popular heuristics. Code, pretrained models and sparsity budgets are at https://github.com/RAIVNLab/STR.

Keywords: Algorithms · Architectures · Computer Vision · Applications - Computer Vision
[ Slides] 

Author Information

Aditya Kusupati (University of Washington)
Vivek Ramanujan (Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence)
Raghav Somani (University of Washington)

I am broadly interested in the aspects of Large-Scale Optimization and Probability theory that arise in fundamental Machine Learning.

Mitchell Wortsman (University of Washington)
Prateek Jain (Microsoft Research)
Sham Kakade (University of Washington)

Sham Kakade is a Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science and Statistics at Harvard University and a co-director of the recently announced Kempner Institute. He works on the mathematical foundations of machine learning and AI. Sham's thesis helped in laying the statistical foundations of reinforcement learning. With his collaborators, his additional contributions include: one of the first provably efficient policy search methods, Conservative Policy Iteration, for reinforcement learning; developing the mathematical foundations for the widely used linear bandit models and the Gaussian process bandit models; the tensor and spectral methodologies for provable estimation of latent variable models; the first sharp analysis of the perturbed gradient descent algorithm, along with the design and analysis of numerous other convex and non-convex algorithms. He is the recipient of the ICML Test of Time Award (2020), the IBM Pat Goldberg best paper award (in 2007), INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing Prize (2014). He has been program chair for COLT 2011. Sham was an undergraduate at Caltech, where he studied physics and worked under the guidance of John Preskill in quantum computing. He then completed his Ph.D. in computational neuroscience at the Gatsby Unit at University College London, under the supervision of Peter Dayan. He was a postdoc at the Dept. of Computer Science, University of Pennsylvania , where he broadened his studies to include computational game theory and economics from the guidance of Michael Kearns. Sham has been a Principal Research Scientist at Microsoft Research, New England, an associate professor at the Department of Statistics, Wharton, UPenn, and an assistant professor at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago.

Ali Farhadi (University of Washington, Allen Institue for AI)

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