Recent works on sparse neural network training (sparse training) have shown that a compelling trade-off between performance and efficiency can be achieved by training intrinsically sparse neural networks from scratch. Existing sparse training methods usually strive to find the best sparse subnetwork possible in one single run, without involving any expensive dense or pre-training steps. For instance, dynamic sparse training (DST), as one of the most prominent directions, is capable of reaching a competitive performance of dense training by iteratively evolving the sparse topology during the course of training. In this paper, we argue that it is better to allocate the limited resources to create multiple low-loss sparse subnetworks and superpose them into a stronger one, instead of allocating all resources entirely to find an individual subnetwork. To achieve this, two desiderata are required: (1) efficiently producing many low-loss subnetworks, the so-called cheap tickets, within one training process limited to the standard training time used in dense training; (2) effectively superposing these cheap tickets into one stronger subnetwork without going over the constrained parameter budget. To corroborate our conjecture, we present a novel sparse training approach, termed \textbf{Sup-tickets}, which can satisfy the above two desiderata concurrently in a single sparse-to-sparse training process. Across various modern architectures on CIFAR-10/100 and ImageNet, we show that Sup-tickets integrates seamlessly with the existing sparse training methods and demonstrates consistent performance improvement.

本文提出了一种用有限的训练资源制造多个性价比高的稀疏神经网络子网络，并将它们叠加在一起形成一个更加强大的子网络的新型稀疏训练方法 Sup-tickets，该方法可以同时满足在标准训练时间内有效地生成多个低损失子网络和有效地将这些低成本子网络叠加成一个更强的子网络的两个愿望。在CIFAR-10/100和ImageNet等各种现代架构上展示了 Sup-tickets 的一致性性能改进。

将多张小票叠加为一张：稀疏神经网络训练的性能提升器