Towards Pruning and Parameter Efficient Fine-tuning of Deep Neural Networks

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have achieved significant success across various applications. However, the increasing number of parameters in state-of-the-art architectures presents challenges such as overfitting and high computational costs. Additionally, with the rising adoption of large language models (LLMs) and the growing demand for per-user or per-task model customization, parameter-efficient fine-tuning has become crucial. Consequently, the exploration of neural network efficiency has emerged as a vibrant and dynamic research area, focusing on optimizing model performance while minimizing resource usage. This dissertation explores neural network efficiency in two directions: pruning and parameter-efficient fine-tuning. Three novel pruning algorithmsL0-ARM, NPN, and Dep-L0are introduced. L0-ARM enhances L0-based pruning with the Augment-Reinforce-Merge gradient estimator, demonstrating superior performance in sparsifying networks. Building on L0-ARM, the Neural Plasticity Network (NPN) enables both network pruning and expansion within the same framework. To address the inconsistencies of L0-based methods on large-scale tasks, Dep-L0 introduces dependency-enabled L0 regularization, leveraging dependency modeling for binary gates. In the realm of parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT), this dissertation introduces VB-LoRA, which implements a novel "divide-and-share" paradigm to address the limitations of low-rank decomposition across matrix dimensions, modules, and layers by globally sharing parameters through a vector bank. The proposed VB-LoRA method composites all low-rank matrices of LoRA from a shared vector bank using a differentiable top-k admixture module. This approach enables VB-LoRA to achieve extreme parameter efficiency while maintaining performance that is comparable to or better than state-of-the-art PEFT methods.