The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis: Finding Sparse, Trainable Neural Networks.

Neural network pruning techniques can reduce the parameter counts of trained networks by over 90%, decreasing storage requirements and improving computational performance of inference without compromising accuracy. However, contemporary experience is that the sparse architectures produced by pruning are difficult to train from the start, which would similarly improve training performance. We find that a standard pruning technique naturally uncovers subnetworks whose initializations made them capable of training effectively. Based on these results, we articulate the lottery ticket hypothesis: dense, randomly-initialized, feed-forward networks contain subnetworks (winning tickets) that-when trained in…