论文标题
探索峰值神经网络中的彩票假设
Exploring Lottery Ticket Hypothesis in Spiking Neural Networks
论文作者
论文摘要
尖峰神经网络(SNN)最近成为新一代的低功耗深神经网络,适合在低功耗移动/边缘设备上实施。由于这些设备的存储器存储有限,因此近年来对SNN的神经修剪进行了广泛的探索。大多数现有的SNN修剪作品都集中在浅SNN(2〜6层)上,但是,最深的SNN(> 16层)是由最先进的SNN作品提出的,这很难与当前的SNN修剪作品兼容。为了扩展针对深SNN的修剪技术,我们研究了彩票假说(LTH),该假设(LTH)指出,密集的网络包含较小的子网络(即获胜的票),这些子网络与密集网络具有可比的性能。我们对LTH的研究表明,获胜的门票始终存在于各种数据集和体系结构的深SNN中,可提供多达97%的稀疏性,而不会产生巨大的降级。但是,LTH的迭代搜索过程与SNN的多个时间段相结合时,带来了巨大的培训计算成本。为了减轻这种沉重的搜索成本,我们提出了早期(ET)票,从而从少量的时间段中找到了重要的重量连接性。拟议的ET票可以与常见的修剪技术无缝地结合使用,以查找获胜的门票,例如迭代幅度修剪(IMP)和早鸟(EB)门票。我们的实验结果表明,与IMP或EB方法相比,提出的ET票证可将搜索时间缩短多达38%。代码可在GitHub上找到。
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have recently emerged as a new generation of low-power deep neural networks, which is suitable to be implemented on low-power mobile/edge devices. As such devices have limited memory storage, neural pruning on SNNs has been widely explored in recent years. Most existing SNN pruning works focus on shallow SNNs (2~6 layers), however, deeper SNNs (>16 layers) are proposed by state-of-the-art SNN works, which is difficult to be compatible with the current SNN pruning work. To scale up a pruning technique towards deep SNNs, we investigate Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH) which states that dense networks contain smaller subnetworks (i.e., winning tickets) that achieve comparable performance to the dense networks. Our studies on LTH reveal that the winning tickets consistently exist in deep SNNs across various datasets and architectures, providing up to 97% sparsity without huge performance degradation. However, the iterative searching process of LTH brings a huge training computational cost when combined with the multiple timesteps of SNNs. To alleviate such heavy searching cost, we propose Early-Time (ET) ticket where we find the important weight connectivity from a smaller number of timesteps. The proposed ET ticket can be seamlessly combined with a common pruning techniques for finding winning tickets, such as Iterative Magnitude Pruning (IMP) and Early-Bird (EB) tickets. Our experiment results show that the proposed ET ticket reduces search time by up to 38% compared to IMP or EB methods. Code is available at Github.