Papers › Data Level Lottery Ticket Hypothesis for Vision Transformers
Data Level Lottery Ticket Hypothesis for Vision Transformers
Xuan Shen, Zhenglun Kong, Minghai Qin, Peiyan Dong, Geng Yuan, Xin Meng, Hao Tang, Xiaolong Ma, Yanzhi Wang
The conventional lottery ticket hypothesis (LTH) claims that there exists a sparse subnetwork within a dense neural network and a proper random initialization method called the winning ticket, such that it can be trained from scratch to almost as good as the dense counterpart. Meanwhile, the research of LTH in vision transformers (ViTs) is scarcely evaluated. In this paper, we first show that the conventional winning ticket is hard to find at the weight level of ViTs by existing methods. Then, we generalize the LTH for ViTs to input data consisting of image patches inspired by the input dependence of ViTs. That is, there exists a subset of input image patches such that a ViT can be trained from scratch by using only this subset of patches and achieve similar accuracy to the ViTs trained by using all image patches. We call this subset of input patches the em winning tickets, which represent a significant amount of information in the input data. We use a ticket selector to generate the winning tickets based on the informativeness of patches for various types of ViT, including DeiT, LV-ViT, and Swin Transformers. The experiments show that there is a clear difference between the performance of models trained with winning tickets and randomly selected subsets, which verifies our proposed theory. We elaborate on the analogical similarity between our proposed Data-LTH-ViTs and the conventional LTH to further verify the integrity of our theory. The Source codes are available at https://github.com/shawnricecake/vit-lottery-ticket-input.
In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
Code
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
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Methods
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