  We present novel techniques to accelerate the convergence of Deep Learning
algorithms by conducting low overhead removal of redundant neurons -- apoptosis
of neurons -- which do not contribute to model learning, during the training
phase itself. We provide in-depth theoretical underpinnings of our heuristics
(bounding accuracy loss and handling apoptosis of several neuron types), and
present the methods to conduct adaptive neuron apoptosis. Specifically, we are
able to improve the training time for several datasets by 2-3x, while reducing
the number of parameters by up to 30x (4-5x on average) on datasets such as
ImageNet classification. For the Higgs Boson dataset, our implementation
improves the accuracy (measured by Area Under Curve (AUC)) for classification
from 0.88/1 to 0.94/1, while reducing the number of parameters by 3x in
comparison to existing literature. The proposed methods achieve a 2.44x speedup
in comparison to the default (no apoptosis) algorithm.

Neural and Evolutionary Computing