================ Workflow ================ **Pruning Workflow:** 1. **Overview:** - Pruning is a technique used to reduce the size of a neural network by eliminating unnecessary connections (weights). - The goal is to create a more efficient and lightweight model without sacrificing performance. 2. **Identifying Insignificant Weights:** - Train the neural network as usual. - Analyze the trained model to identify weights that contribute less to the overall performance. - Weights with low magnitudes are considered less important. 3. **Pruning Criteria:** - Define a pruning threshold or criteria for determining which weights to prune. - Common criteria include magnitude-based pruning, where weights below a certain threshold are pruned. 4. **Pruning Process:** - Apply the pruning criteria to the identified weights. - Set the weights below the threshold to zero or remove them from the network. - This results in a sparse or pruned model. 5. **Fine-tuning:** - Retrain the pruned model to recover any lost accuracy. - Fine-tuning helps the model adapt to the changes introduced by pruning. 6. **Benefits:** - Reduced model size, leading to faster inference and lower memory requirements. - Potential speedup during training due to the sparsity introduced by pruning. **Quantization Workflow:** 1. **Overview:** - Quantization involves reducing the precision of the weights and activations in a neural network. - It replaces floating-point numbers with lower bit-width representations, such as integers. 2. **Quantization Levels:** - Choose the bit-width for quantization (e.g., 8-bit, 16-bit). - Lower bit-widths lead to reduced memory and computational requirements but may impact model accuracy. 3. **Quantization of Weights and Activations:** - Apply quantization to both the model weights and activations. - Convert floating-point values to their quantized equivalents using a specified quantization scheme. 4. **Quantization Schemes:** - Common quantization schemes include linear quantization, where values are uniformly quantized within a specified range, and non-linear quantization, which uses a non-uniform distribution. 5. **Fine-tuning:** - Retrain the quantized model to recover any accuracy loss. - Fine-tuning is crucial to adjust the model for the reduced precision. 6. **Benefits:** - Reduced memory footprint and storage requirements. - Accelerated inference due to the use of lower precision computations. - Improved deployment on devices with limited computational resources. .. image:: https://github.com/satabios/sconce/blob/main/docs/source/images/sconce-workflow.jpeg?raw=true :align: center