Authors: Max Zimmer, Christoph Spiegel, Sebastian Pokutta

This repository contains the code to reproduce the experiments from the ICLR24 paper "Sparse Model Soups: A Recipe for Improved Pruning via Model Averaging". The code is based on PyTorch 1.9 and the experiment-tracking platform Weights & Biases. See the blog post or the twitter thread for a TL;DR.

Experiments are started from the following file:

• main.py: Starts experiments using the dictionary format of Weights & Biases.

The rest of the project is structured as follows:

• strategies: Contains the strategies used for training, pruning and model averaging.
• runners: Contains classes to control the training and collection of metrics.
• metrics: Contains all metrics as well as FLOP computation methods.
• models: Contains all model architectures used.
• utilities: Contains useful auxiliary functions and classes.

An entire experiment is subdivided into multiple steps, each being multiple (potentially many) different runs and wandb experiments. First of all, a model has to be pretrained using the Dense strategy. This steps is completely agnostic to any pruning specifications. Then, for each phase or prune-retrain-cycle (specified by the n_phases parameter and controlled by phase parameter), the following steps are executed:

1. Strategy IMP: Prune the model using the IMP strategy. Here, it is important to specify the ensemble_by, split_val and n_splits_total parameters:
   • ensemble_by: The parameter which is varied when retraining multiple models. E.g. setting this to weight_decay will train multiple models with different weight decay values.
   • split_val: The value by which the ensemble_by parameter is split. E.g. setting this to 0.0001 while using weight_decay as ensemble_by will retrain a model with weight decay 0.0001, all else being equal.
   • n_splits_total: The total number of splits for the ensemble_by parameter. If set to three, the souping operation in the next step will expect three models to be present, given the ensemble_by configuration.
2. Strategy Ensemble: Souping the models. This step will average the weights of the models specified by the ensemble_by parameter. The ensemble_by parameter has to be the same as in the previous step. n_splits_total has to be the same as well. split_val is not used in this step and has to be set to None. The ensemble_method parameter controls how the models are averaged.

In case you find the paper or the implementation useful for your own research, please consider citing:

@inproceedings{zimmer2024sparse,
title={Sparse Model Soups: A Recipe for Improved Pruning via Model Averaging},
author={Max Zimmer and Christoph Spiegel and Sebastian Pokutta},
booktitle={The Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations},
year={2024},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=xx0ITyHp3u}
}