What Does AI Pruning Mean?

AI pruning, also known as neural network pruning, is a collection of strategies for editing a neural network to make it as lean as possible. The editing process involves removing unnecessary parameters, artificial neurons, weights, or deep learning network layers.

The goal is to improve network efficiency without significantly impacting the accuracy of a machine learning models accuracy.

A deep neural network can contain millions or even billions of parameters and hyperparameters that are used to fine-tune a models performance during the training phase. Many of them wont be used again very often or even at all once the trained model has been deployed.

If done right, pruning can:

To improve efficiency without significant loss of accuracy, pruning is often used in combination with two other optimization techniques: quantization and knowledge distillation. Both of these compression techniques use reduced precision to improve efficiency.

Pruning can be particularly valuable for deploying large artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) models on resource-constrained devices like smartphones or Internet of Things (IoT) devices at the edge of the network.

Pruning can address these challenges by:

Pruning has become an important strategy for ensuring ML models and algorithms are both efficient and effective at the edge of the network, closer to where data is generated and where quick decisions are needed.

The problem is that pruning is a balancing act. While the ultimate goal is to reduce the size of a neural network model, pruning can not create a significant loss in performance. A model that is pruned too heavily can require extensive retraining, and a model that is pruned too lightly can be more expensive to maintain and operate.

One of the biggest challenges is determining when to prune.Iterative pruning takes place multiple times during the training process. After each pruning iteration, the network is fine-tuned to recover any lost accuracy, and the process is repeated until the desired level of sparsity (reduction in parameters) is achieved. In contrast, one-shot pruning is done all at once, typically after the network has been fully trained.

Which approach is better can depend on the specific network architecture, the target deployment environment, and the models use cases.

If model accuracy is of utmost importance, and there are sufficient computational resources and time for training, iterative pruning is likely to be more effective. On the other hand, one-shot pruning is quicker and can often reduce the model size and inference time to an acceptable level without the need for multiple iterations.

In practice, using a combination of both techniques and a more advanced pruning strategy like magnitude-based structured pruning can help achieve the best balance between model efficiency and optimal outputs.

Magnitude-based pruning is one of the most common advanced AI pruning strategies. It involves removing less important or redundant connections (weights) between neurons in a neural network.

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What is AI Pruning? Definition from Techopedia.com - Techopedia