Paper ID: 2402.14029

Partial Search in a Frozen Network is Enough to Find a Strong Lottery Ticket

Hikari Otsuka, Daiki Chijiwa, Ángel López García-Arias, Yasuyuki Okoshi, Kazushi Kawamura, Thiem Van Chu, Daichi Fujiki, Susumu Takeuchi, Masato Motomura

Randomly initialized dense networks contain subnetworks that achieve high accuracy without weight learning -- strong lottery tickets (SLTs). Recently, Gadhikar et al. (2023) demonstrated that SLTs can also be found within a randomly pruned source network, thus reducing the SLT search space. However, this limits the search to SLTs that are even sparser than the source, leading to worse accuracy due to unintentionally high sparsity. This paper proposes a method that reduces the SLT search space by an arbitrary ratio independent of the desired SLT sparsity. A random subset of the initial weights is excluded from the search space by freezing it -- i.e., by either permanently pruning them or locking them as a fixed part of the SLT. In addition to reducing search space, the proposed random freezing can also provide the benefit of reducing the model size for inference. Furthermore, experimental results show that the proposed method finds SLTs with better accuracy-to-model size trade-off than the SLTs obtained from dense or randomly pruned source networks. In particular, the SLTs found in Frozen ResNets on image classification using ImageNet significantly improve the accuracy-to-search space and accuracy-to-model size trade-offs over SLTs within dense (non-freezing) or sparse (non-locking) random networks.

Submitted: Feb 20, 2024