Combining Relevance and Magnitude for Resource-saving DNN Pruning
Journal article, 2026
Pruning neural networks, i.e., removing some of their parameters whilst retaining their accuracy, is one of the main ways to reduce the latency of a machine learning pipeline, especially in resource- and/or bandwidth-constrained scenarios. In this context, the pruning technique, i.e., how to choose the parameters to remove, is critical to the system performance. In this paper, we propose a novel pruning approach, called FlexRel and predicated upon combining training-time and inference-time information, namely, parameter magnitude and relevance, in order to improve the resulting accuracy whilst saving both computational resources and bandwidth. Our performance evaluation shows that FlexRel is able to achieve higher pruning factors, saving over 35% bandwidth for typical accuracy targets.
Distributed learning
Resource utilization
Machine Learning model compression
Author
Carla Fabiana Chiasserini
Polytechnic University of Turin
Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Computer and Network Systems
Consiglo Nazionale Delle Richerche
Consorzio Nazionale Interuniversitario per le Telecomunicazioni (CNIT)
Francesco Malandrino
Consiglo Nazionale Delle Richerche
Consorzio Nazionale Interuniversitario per le Telecomunicazioni (CNIT)
N. Molner
Instituto de Telecomunicaciones y Aplicaciones Multimedia
Z. Zhao
Polytechnic University of Turin
IEEE Network
0890-8044 (ISSN) 1558156x (eISSN)
Vol. 40 1Subject Categories (SSIF 2025)
Computer Sciences
DOI
10.1109/MNET.2025.3556212