ESPN: Extremely Sparse Pruned Networks

Deep neural networks are often highly over-parameterized, prohibiting their use in compute-limited systems. However, a line of recent works has shown that the size of deep networks can be considerably reduced by identifying a subset of neuron indicators (or mask) that correspond to significant weights prior to training. We demonstrate that a simple iterative mask discovery method can achieve state-of-the-art compression of very deep networks. Our algorithm represents a hybrid approach between single-shot network pruning methods (such as SNIP) with Lottery-Ticket type approaches. We validate our approach on several datasets and outperform several existing pruning approaches in both test accuracy and compression ratio.