Papers › Compact and Optimal Deep Learning with Recurrent Parameter Generators

Compact and Optimal Deep Learning with Recurrent Parameter Generators

15 Jul 2021arXiv:2107.07110archive 2025-07-28

Jiayun Wang, Yubei Chen, Stella X. Yu, Brian Cheung, Yann Lecun

Deep learning has achieved tremendous success by training increasingly large models, which are then compressed for practical deployment. We propose a drastically different approach to compact and optimal deep learning: We decouple the Degrees of freedom (DoF) and the actual number of parameters of a model, optimize a small DoF with predefined random linear constraints for a large model of arbitrary architecture, in one-stage end-to-end learning. Specifically, we create a recurrent parameter generator (RPG), which repeatedly fetches parameters from a ring and unpacks them onto a large model with random permutation and sign flipping to promote parameter decorrelation. We show that gradient descent can automatically find the best model under constraints with faster convergence. Our extensive experimentation reveals a log-linear relationship between model DoF and accuracy. Our RPG demonstrates remarkable DoF reduction and can be further pruned and quantized for additional run-time performance gain. For example, in terms of top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, RPG achieves 96% of ResNet18's performance with only 18% DoF (the equivalent of one convolutional layer) and 52% of ResNet34's performance with only 0.25% DoF! Our work shows a significant potential of constrained neural optimization in compact and optimal deep learning.

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conv1x1 samaonline/Recurrent-Parameter-Generators/supermodels/super_resnet_equal.py official repository ran · our draft was wrong BSD-3-Clause (permissive) · d9def42110729a85 · report
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Tasks

Deep LearningImage ClassificationModel Compression

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Image Classification ObjectNet ResNet34-RPG Top-1 Accuracy 16.5 #97 of 106 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

1x1 ConvolutionAverage PoolingBatch NormalizationBottleneck Residual BlockConvolutionGlobal Average PoolingKaiming InitializationMax PoolingReLUResidual BlockResidual Connection

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