{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/woodfisher-efficient-second-order","title":"WoodFisher: Efficient Second-Order Approximation for Neural Network Compression","arxiv_id":"2004.14340","date":"2020-04-29","proceeding":"NeurIPS 2020 12","authors":["Sidak Pal Singh","Dan Alistarh"],"abstract":"Second-order information, in the form of Hessian- or Inverse-Hessian-vector products, is a fundamental tool for solving optimization problems. Recently, there has been significant interest in utilizing this information in the context of deep neural networks; however, relatively little is known about the quality of existing approximations in this context. Our work examines this question, identifies issues with existing approaches, and proposes a method called WoodFisher to compute a faithful and efficient estimate of the inverse Hessian. Our main application is to neural network compression, where we build on the classic Optimal Brain Damage/Surgeon framework. We demonstrate that WoodFisher significantly outperforms popular state-of-the-art methods for one-shot pruning. Further, even when iterative, gradual pruning is considered, our method results in a gain in test accuracy over the state-of-the-art approaches, for pruning popular neural networks (like ResNet-50, MobileNetV1) trained on standard image classification datasets such as ImageNet ILSVRC. We examine how our method can be extended to take into account first-order information, as well as illustrate its ability to automatically set layer-wise pruning thresholds and perform compression in the limited-data regime. The code is available at the following link, https://github.com/IST-DASLab/WoodFisher.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.14340v5","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2004.14340v5.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"woodfisher-efficient-second-order","repo_url":"https://github.com/IST-DASLab/WoodFisher","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"image-classification","task_name":"Image Classification"},{"task_slug":"model-compression","task_name":"Model Compression"},{"task_slug":"neural-network-compression","task_name":"Neural Network Compression"},{"task_slug":"image-classification","task_name":"image-classification"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"pruning","method_name":"Pruning"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2004.14340","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}