The silence of the weights: an investigation of structural pruning strategies for attention-based audio signal architectures

Abstract: Transformer-based models have become the state of the art across multiple domains, from natural language processing to machine listening, thanks to attention mechanisms. However, the attention layers require a large number of parameters and high-end hardware for both training and inference. We propose a novel pruning technique targeted explicitly at the attention mechanism, where we decouple the pruning of the four layers in the attention block, namely: query, keys, values and outputs' projection matrices. We also investigate pruning strategies to prune along the head and channel dimensions, and compare the performance of the Audio Spectrogram Transformer (AST) model under different pruning scenarios. Our results show that even by pruning 50\% of the attention parameters we incur in performance degradation of less than 1\%