Abstract
Publications home
Progressive skeletonization: trimming more fat from a network at initialization
at
| Pau De Jorge, Amartya Sanyal, Harkirat Behl, Philip Torr, Gregory Rogez, Puneet Dokania |
| International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), virtual event, 4-8 May, 2021 |
| OpenReview |
| arXiv |
Recent studies have shown that skeletonization (pruning parameters) of networks at initialization provides all the practical benefits of sparsity both at inference and training time, while only marginally degrading their performance. However, we observe that beyond a certain level of sparsity (approx 95% ), these approaches fail to preserve the network performance, and to our surprise, in many cases perform even worse than trivial random pruning. To this end, we propose to find a skeletonized network with maximum foresight connection sensitivity (FORCE). Intuitively, out of all possible sub-networks, we propose to find the one whose connections would have a maximum impact on the loss when perturbed. Our approximate solution to maximize the FORCE, progressively prunes connections of a given network at initialization. This allows parameters that were unimportant at earlier stages of skeletonization to become important at later stages. In many cases, our approach enables us to remove up to 99.5% parameters, while keeping networks trainable and providing significantly better performance than recent approaches. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach at various levels of sparsity through extensive experiments and analysis.
Related Content
To make robots autonomous in real-world everyday spaces, they should be able to learn from their interactions within these spaces, how to best execute tasks specified by non-expert users in a safe and reliable way. To do so requires sequential decision-making skills that combine machine learning, adaptive planning and control in uncertain environments as well as solving hard combinatorial optimisation problems. Our research combines expertise in reinforcement learning, computer vision, robotic control, sim2real transfer, large multimodal foundation models and neural combinatorial optimisation to build AI-based architectures and algorithms to improve robot autonomy and robustness when completing everyday complex tasks in constantly changing environments.
VISION
The research we conduct on expressive visual representations is applicable to visual search, object detection, image classification and the automatic extraction of 3D human poses and shapes that can be used for human behavior understanding and prediction, human-robot interaction or even avatar animation. We also extract 3D information from images that can be used for intelligent robot navigation, augmented reality and the 3D reconstruction of objects, buildings or even entire cities.
Our work covers the spectrum from unsupervised to supervised approaches, and from very deep architectures to very compact ones. We’re excited about the promise of big data to bring big performance gains to our algorithms but also passionate about the challenge of working in data-scarce and low-power scenarios.
Furthermore, we believe that a modern computer vision system needs to be able to continuously adapt itself to its environment and to improve itself via lifelong learning. Our driving goal is to use our research to deliver embodied intelligence to our users in robotics, autonomous driving, via phone cameras and any other visual means to reach people wherever they may be.
This web site uses cookies for the site search, to display videos and for aggregate site analytics.
Learn more about these cookies in our privacy notice.
Cookie settings
You may choose which kind of cookies you allow when visiting this website. Click on "Save cookie settings" to apply your choice.
This content is currently blocked. To view the content please either 'Accept social media cookies' or 'Accept all cookies'.
For more information on cookies see our privacy notice.