We rigorously evaluate three state-of-the-art techniques for inducing sparsity in deep neural networks on two large-scale learning tasks: Transformer trained on WMT 2014 English-to-German, and ResNet-50 trained on ImageNet. Across thousands of experiments, we demonstrate that complex techniques (Molchanov et al., 2017; Louizos et al., 2017b) shown to yield high compression rates on smaller datasets perform inconsistently, and that simple magnitude pruning approaches achieve comparable or better results. Additionally, we replicate the experiments performed by (Frankle & Carbin, 2018) and (Liu et al., 2018) at scale and show that unstructured sparse architectures learned through pruning cannot be trained from scratch to the same test set performance as a model trained with joint sparsification and optimization. Together, these results highlight the need for large-scale benchmarks in the field of model compression. We open-source our code, top performing model checkpoints, and results of all hyperparameter configurations to establish rigorous baselines for future work on compression and sparsification.

本文评估了三种在深度神经网络中引入稀疏性的技术，并对两个大规模的学习任务进行了严格评估，结果表明，简单的幅度剪枝方法可以获得相当或更好的性能，而不能从头开始训练稀疏结构，并强调了建立大规模基准测试的必要性。

深度神经网络中稀疏性的状态