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Sanity Checks for Lottery Tickets: Does Your Winning Ticket Really Win the Jackpot?

  • Xiaolong Ma
  • , Geng Yuan
  • , Xuan Shen
  • , Tianlong Chen
  • , Xuxi Chen
  • , Xiaohan Chen
  • , Ning Liu
  • , Minghai Qin
  • , Sijia Liu
  • , Zhangyang Wang
  • , Yanzhi Wang

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

There have been long-standing controversies and inconsistencies over the experiment setup and criteria for identifying the “winning ticket” in literature. To reconcile such, we revisit the definition of lottery ticket hypothesis, with comprehensive and more rigorous conditions. Under our new definition, we show concrete evidence to clarify whether the winning ticket exists across the major DNN architectures and/or applications. Through extensive experiments, we perform quantitative analysis on the correlations between winning tickets and various experimental factors, and empirically study the patterns of our observations. We find that the key training hyperparameters, such as learning rate and training epochs, as well as the architecture characteristics such as capacities and residual connections, are all highly correlated with whether and when the winning tickets can be identified. Based on our analysis, we summarize a guideline for parameter settings in regards of specific architecture characteristics, which we hope to catalyze the research progress on the topic of lottery ticket hypothesis. Our codes are publicly available at: https://github.com/boone891214/sanity-check-LTH.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationAdvances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34 - 35th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS 2021
EditorsMarc'Aurelio Ranzato, Alina Beygelzimer, Yann Dauphin, Percy S. Liang, Jenn Wortman Vaughan
PublisherNeural information processing systems foundation
Pages12749-12760
Number of pages12
ISBN (Electronic)9781713845393
StatePublished - 2021
Externally publishedYes
Event35th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS 2021 - Virtual, Online
Duration: Dec 6 2021Dec 14 2021

Publication series

NameAdvances in Neural Information Processing Systems
Volume16
ISSN (Print)1049-5258

Conference

Conference35th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS 2021
CityVirtual, Online
Period12/6/2112/14/21

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Signal Processing
  • Information Systems
  • Computer Networks and Communications

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