Portrait of Marwa El Halabi

Marwa El Halabi

Independent visiting researcher - Samsung SAIT
Supervisor
Simon Lacoste-Julien
Research Topics
Machine Learning Theory
Model Compression
Optimization
Website
Google Scholar
GitHub

Publications

Data-Efficient Structured Pruning via Submodular Optimization
Marwa El Halabi
Suraj Srinivas
Simon Lacoste-Julien
Structured pruning is an effective approach for compressing large pre-trained neural networks without significantly affecting their performa… (see more)nce. However, most current structured pruning methods do not provide any performance guarantees, and often require fine-tuning, which makes them inapplicable in the limited-data regime. We propose a principled data-efficient structured pruning method based on submodular optimization. In particular, for a given layer, we select neurons/channels to prune and corresponding new weights for the next layer, that minimize the change in the next layer's input induced by pruning. We show that this selection problem is a weakly submodular maximization problem, thus it can be provably approximated using an efficient greedy algorithm. Our method is guaranteed to have an exponentially decreasing error between the original model and the pruned model outputs w.r.t the pruned size, under reasonable assumptions. It is also one of the few methods in the literature that uses only a limited-number of training data and no labels. Our experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in the limited-data regime.
openreview.net