2025/11/24 by Chinmay Tripurwar, Tripurwar, Chinmay, Utkarsh Maurya +2
Computer Science · #Advanced Neural Network Applications #Adversarial Robustness in Machine Learning #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Privacy-Preserving Technologies in Data
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2511.20702
openalex publication_date 2025/11/24 · openalex created_date 2025/11/28 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Model pruning is a widely adopted technique to reduce the computational complexity and memory footprint of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). However, global unstructured pruning often leads to significant degradation in accuracy, typically necessitating fine-tuning on the original training dataset to recover performance. In privacy-sensitive domains such as healthcare or finance, access to the original training data is often restricted post-deployment due to regulations (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA). This paper proposes a Data-Free Knowledge Distillation framework to bridge the gap between model compression and data privacy. We utilize DeepInversion to synthesize privacy-preserving ``dream'' images from the pre-trained teacher model by inverting Batch Normalization (BN) statistics. These synthetic images serve as a transfer set to distill knowledge from the original teacher to the pruned student network. Experimental results on CIFAR-10 across various architectures (ResNet, MobileNet, VGG) demonstrate that our method significantly recovers accuracy lost during pruning without accessing a single real data point.