# Weight-dependent Gates for Network Pruning

Source: [Weight-dependent Gates for Network Pruning](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa6c9d1e209131cea34ee3>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-26T00:14:46.163Z

Authors: Yun Li, Zechun Liu, Weiqun Wu, Haotian Yao, Xiangyu Zhang, Chi Zhang, Baoqun Yin

Published: 2020-07-04T10:29:07.000Z

## Abstract

In this paper, a simple yet effective network pruning framework is proposed to simultaneously address the problems of pruning indicator, pruning ratio, and efficiency constraint. This paper argues that the pruning decision should depend on the convolutional weights, and thus proposes novel weight-dependent gates (W-Gates) to learn the information from filter weights and obtain binary gates to prune or keep the filters automatically. To prune the network under efficiency constraints, a switchable Efficiency Module is constructed to predict the hardware latency or FLOPs of candidate pruned networks. Combined with the proposed Efficiency Module, W-Gates can perform filter pruning in an efficiency-aware manner and achieve a compact network with a better accuracy-efficiency trade-off. We have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method on ResNet34, ResNet50, and MobileNet V2, respectively achieving up to 1.33/1.28/1.1 higher Top-1 accuracy with lower hardware latency on ImageNet. Compared with state-of-the-art methods, W-Gates also achieves superior performance.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.02066>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2007.02066.pdf>)