Sparsity has become one of the promising methods to compress and accelerate Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). Among different categories of sparsity, structured sparsity has gained more attention due to its efficient execution on modern accelerators. Particularly, N:M sparsity is attractive because there are already hardware accelerator architectures that can leverage certain forms of N:M structured sparsity to yield higher compute-efficiency. In this work, we focus on N:M sparsity and extensively study and evaluate various training recipes for N:M sparsity in terms of the trade-off between model accuracy and compute cost (FLOPs). Building upon this study, we propose two new decay-based pruning methods, namely "pruning mask decay" and "sparse structure decay". Our evaluations indicate that these proposed methods consistently deliver state-of-the-art (SOTA) model accuracy, comparable to unstructured sparsity, on a Transformer-based model for a translation task. The increase in the accuracy of the sparse model using the new training recipes comes at the cost of marginal increase in the total training compute (FLOPs).

本文研究N:M稀疏性训练的不同方法，并提出了两种新的基于衰减的修剪方法，即“修剪掩码衰减”和“稀疏结构衰减”。研究表明，这些提出的方法在保持与非结构化稀疏性可比的模型精度同时，增加的总训练计算量（FLOPs）相对较小。

带有衰减剪枝掩码的N:M结构稀疏化训练配方