# GOHSP: A Unified Framework of Graph and Optimization-based Heterogeneous Structured Pruning for Vision Transformer Source: [GOHSP: A Unified Framework of Graph and Optimization-based Heterogeneous Structured Pruning for Vision Transformer]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2025-10-26T00:59:52.182Z Authors: Miao Yin, Burak Uzkent, Yilin Shen, Hongxia Jin, Bo Yuan Published: 2023-01-13T00:40:24.000Z ## Abstract The recently proposed Vision transformers (ViTs) have shown very impressive empirical performance in various computer vision tasks, and they are viewed as an important type of foundation model. However, ViTs are typically constructed with large-scale sizes, which then severely hinder their potential deployment in many practical resources-constrained applications. To mitigate this challenging problem, structured pruning is a promising solution to compress model size and enable practical efficiency. However, unlike its current popularity for CNNs and RNNs, structured pruning for ViT models is little explored. In this paper, we propose GOHSP, a unified framework of Graph and Optimization-based Structured Pruning for ViT models. We first develop a graph-based ranking for measuring the importance of attention heads, and the extracted importance information is further integrated to an optimization-based procedure to impose the heterogeneous structured sparsity patterns on the ViT models. Experimental results show that our proposed GOHSP demonstrates excellent compression performance. On CIFAR-10 dataset, our approach can bring 40% parameters reduction with no accuracy loss for ViT-Small model. On ImageNet dataset, with 30% and 35% sparsity ratio for DeiT-Tiny and DeiT-Small models, our approach achieves 1.65% and 0.76% accuracy increase over the existing structured pruning methods, respectively. ## 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. - [Image Classification on ImageNet 1K (Top-1 Accuracy and Change)](): Image Classification; ImageNet-1K; Top-1 Accuracy: 79.98. - [Image Classification on ImageNet-1K (val) (Accuracy)](): Image Classification; ImageNet-1k (val); Top-1 Accuracy: not recorded. ## Original sources and implementation [Original paper]() [PDF]()