Balancing pruning and model performance
Finding the right balance between pruning and model performance is critical. Aggressive pruning can lead to significant performance degradation, while too little pruning may not yield enough benefits. The key is to identify which parts of the model can be pruned with minimal impact on accuracy. This requires careful validation after each pruning step and close monitoring of key performance metrics. These metrics include parameter reduction rates, inference speed gains, memory footprint reduction, changes in perplexity, and task-specific performance. Throughout the process, it’s crucial to balance the accuracy-efficiency trade-off to ensure the pruned model retains acceptable performance despite having fewer parameters
A common strategy is to apply fine-tuning after pruning to restore some of the lost performance. Fine-tuning allows the model to adjust to the pruned structure and recover its original capabilities:
import torch.nn...