Spectral pruning of fully connected layers

Abstract

Training of neural networks can be reformulated in spectral space, by allowing eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the network to act as target of the optimization instead of the individual weights. Working in this setting, we show that the eigenvalues can be used to rank the nodes’ importance within the ensemble. Indeed, we will prove that sorting the nodes based on their associated eigenvalues, enables effective pre- and post-processing pruning strategies to yield massively compacted networks (in terms of the number of composing neurons) with virtually unchanged performance. The proposed methods are tested for different architectures, with just a single or multiple hidden layers, and against distinct classification tasks of general interest.

Lorenzo Giambagli

PostDoc Department of Physics, Freie Universität Berlin

My research interests include Spectral analysis of Deep Neural Network (DNN), Structura Pruning, Bayesian Inference in DNN, Simplicial Complexes Dynamics, Theoretical Neuroscience