Training convolutional neural networks (CNNs) is time consuming. Prior work has explored how to reduce the computational demands of training by eliminating gradients with relatively small magnitude. We show that eliminating small magnitude components has limited impact on the direction of high-dimensional vectors. However, in the context of training a CNN, we find that eliminating small magnitude components of weight and activation vectors allows us to train deeper networks on more complex datasets versus eliminating small magnitude components of gradients. We propose Sparse Weight Activation Training (SWAT), an algorithm that embodies these observations. SWAT reduces computations by 50% to 80% with better accuracy at a given level of sparsity versus the Dynamic Sparse Graph algorithm. SWAT also reduces memory footprint by 23% to 37% for activations and 50% to 80% for weights.
This paper studies training neural networks with sparse weights and sparse activations (SWAT training). By using sparse weights in forward passes as well as sparse weights and activations in backward passes, SWAT can reduce the computation overhead and also reduce the training memory footprint. The primary contributions of the paper are in three folds: 1) The authors empirically compare the impact of (activation) gradient sparsity and weight + activation sparsity on the model performance---the comparison shows that the weight + activation sparsity has less influence on the model accuracy; 2) Across different models on CIFAR and ImageNet dataset, SWAP can reduce the training flops by 50% to 80% while using roughly 2 to 3x less training memory footprint saving (weight + activation); 3) The authors empirically study on why training using top-K based sparsification can attain strong model accuracy---the magnitude-based top-K approach can roughly preserve the directions of the vectors.
I think the claimed contributions are well-validated in general. The design decisions of the approach are well supported by empirical observations and the components of the approach (different top-K methods) are studied properly. Additionally, I like the authors' synthetic-data studies to shed light on why top-K based sparsity can work well. Given the above reason, I give week accept and I am willing to raise the score if the following questions / concerns can be resolved in the rebuttal / future draft:
1. In results such as in figure 4, we observe that using intermediate levels of sparsity can actually demonstrate better generalization performance than the dense baseline training approach. I was wondering if this is because the default hyperparameter produces better training loss in sparse training than in dense training, and consequently the sparse training test performance is also improved over dense training. Without showing this, it is not fully convincing that intermediate sparsity helps prevent overfitting and generalizes better (as the authors discussed in the text).
2. For "Impact on Convergence" in section 3.2, it is not clear to me what the authors are using as a metric for the degree of convergence. Thus I can not evaluate the claims here.
3. For "Efficient Top K implementation" in section 3.2, the authors suggest  only computing the K-th largest elements periodically to further improve efficiency. However the empirical evidence of whether this approach will significantly degrade the model performance at the end of training is not provided.
4. For the GFLOPS comparison in Figure 7, could the authors elaborate what operations are included into the count? As the sparse operations requires additional indexing operations for computation, I was wondering whether the GFLOPS can realistically reflect the real latency / energy efficiency of the SWAT approach.
5. How the memory access count calculated at the end of page 7? Is it counting the number of float point values (activations, activation gradients, weights) that needs to be fetched for forward and backward pass?
6. At the first paragraph in page 8 (last paragraph above section 4), do the authors imply that the activations of BN layers is not sparsified? Could the authors provide a bit more evidence on how (any why) sparsification of BN activation impacts the model performance.