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Learning both Weights and Connections for Efficient Neural Networks

2015/06/08 by Song Han, Han, Song, Jeff Pool +5 · 170 citations
Computer Science · #Advanced Neural Network Applications #Adversarial Robustness in Machine Learning #Anomaly Detection Techniques and Applications #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Neural and Evolutionary Computing (cs.NE)

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1506.02626

openalex publication_date 2015/06/08 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

Neural networks are both computationally intensive and memory intensive, making them difficult to deploy on embedded systems. Also, conventional networks fix the architecture before training starts; as a result, training cannot improve the architecture. To address these limitations, we describe a method to reduce the storage and computation required by neural networks by an order of magnitude without affecting their accuracy by learning only the important connections. Our method prunes redundant connections using a three-step method. First, we train the network to learn which connections are important. Next, we prune the unimportant connections. Finally, we retrain the network to fine tune the weights of the remaining connections. On the ImageNet dataset, our method reduced the number of parameters of AlexNet by a factor of 9x, from 61 million to 6.7 million, without incurring accuracy loss. Similar experiments with VGG-16 found that the number of parameters can be reduced by 13x, from 138 million to 10.3 million, again with no loss of accuracy.

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