Gradient-Free Filter Importance for Structured Pruning of Compact EEG Networks

Deploying EEG classification networks on resource-constrained brain–computer interface (BCI) hardware motivates structured filter pruning, yet which importance criterion to trust in already-compact architectures is unclear. We present a leakage-free, physically materialized comparison of five filter-importance criteria—ablation-based structural sensitivity analysis (SSA), first-order Taylor, L1-norm, geometric median, and random—across four datasets, two paradigms (motor imagery and ERP), two architectures, multiple capacities, and with and without fine-tuning. On EEGNet, after fine-tuning, SSA and Taylor are statistically equivalent: pooled over the four datasets their accuracy difference falls within a ±1 percentage-point margin (TOST, p=0.01), and on ShallowConvNet SSA is never worse than Taylor; both criteria significantly outperform the weight-based and random ones. SSA’s value is therefore not a more accurate ranking but its formulation: on a weight-quantized (8-bit) EEGNet, where the loss gradient—and hence Taylor—is undefined on the quantized graph used here, SSA is the best gradient-free criterion, significantly beating L1, geometric-median, and random pruning in aggregate—extending structured pruning to the quantized, gradient-free but editable deployment regime. We further show that the pruning schedule and fine-tuning matter more than the choice between strong criteria, and that training large then pruning with fine-tuning recovers accuracy equivalent to a directly trained smaller model. The results clarify where the importance criterion does and does not matter for compact EEG decoders.