Max-Affine Spline Insights Into Deep Network Pruning

State-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches to deep network (DN) training overparametrize the model and then prune a posteriori to obtain a “winning ticket” subnetwork that can achieve high accuracy. Using a recently developed spline interpretation of DNs, we obtain novel insights into how DN pruning affects its mapping. In particular, under the realm of spline operators, we are able to pinpoint the impact of pruning onto the DN’s underlying input space partition and per-region affine mappings, opening new avenues in understanding why and when are pruned DNs able to maintain high performance. We also discover that a DN’s spline mapping exhibits an early-bird (EB) phenomenon whereby the spline’s partition converges at early training stages, bridging the recently developed DN spline theory and lottery ticket hypothesis of DNs. We finally leverage this new insight to develop a principled and efficient pruning strategy whose goal is to prune isolated groups of nodes that have a redundant contribution in the forming of the spline partition. Extensive experiments on four networks and three datasets validate that our new spline-based DN pruning approach reduces training FLOPs by up to 3.5× while achieving similar or even better accuracy than current state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/RICE-EIC/Spline-EB.