Principal Component Networks: Parameter Reduction Early in Training

Abstract: Recent works show that overparameterized networks contain small subnetworks that exhibit comparable accuracy to the full model when trained in isolation. These results highlight the potential to reduce training costs of deep neural networks without sacrificing generalization performance. However, existing approaches for finding these small networks rely on expensive multi-round train-and-prune procedures and are non-practical for large data sets and models. In this paper, we show how to find small networks that exhibit the same performance as their overparameterized counterparts after only a few training epochs. We find that hidden layer activations in overparameterized networks exist primarily in subspaces smaller than the actual model width. Building on this observation, we use PCA to find a basis of high variance for layer inputs and represent layer weights using these directions. We eliminate all weights not relevant to the found PCA basis and term these network architectures Principal Component Networks. On CIFAR-10 and ImageNet, we show that PCNs train faster and use less energy than overparameterized models, without accuracy loss. We find that our transformation leads to networks with up to 23.8x fewer parameters, with equal or higher end-model accuracy---in some cases we observe improvements up to 3%. We also show that ResNet-20 PCNs outperform deep ResNet-110 networks while training faster.