Papers › Efficient Sparse-Winograd Convolutional Neural Networks

Efficient Sparse-Winograd Convolutional Neural Networks

18 Feb 2018ICLR 2018 1arXiv:1802.06367archive 2025-07-28

Xingyu Liu, Jeff Pool, Song Han, William J. Dally

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are computationally intensive, which limits their application on mobile devices. Their energy is dominated by the number of multiplies needed to perform the convolutions. Winograd's minimal filtering algorithm (Lavin, 2015) and network pruning (Han et al., 2015) can reduce the operation count, but these two methods cannot be directly combined - applying the Winograd transform fills in the sparsity in both the weights and the activations. We propose two modifications to Winograd-based CNNs to enable these methods to exploit sparsity. First, we move the ReLU operation into the Winograd domain to increase the sparsity of the transformed activations. Second, we prune the weights in the Winograd domain to exploit static weight sparsity. For models on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet datasets, our method reduces the number of multiplications by 10.4×, 6.8× and 10.8× respectively with loss of accuracy less than 0.1%, outperforming previous baselines by 2.0×-3.0×. We also show that moving ReLU to the Winograd domain allows more aggressive pruning.

PaperPDFConference PDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

xingyul/Sparse-Winograd-CNN officialmentioned in papertf report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Network Pruning

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

PruningReLU

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections