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Abstract

We show implicit filter level sparsity manifests in convolutional neural
networks (CNNs) which employ Batch Normalization and ReLU activation, and are
trained with adaptive gradient descent techniques and L2 regularization or
weight decay. Through an extensive empirical study (Mehta et al., 2019) we
hypothesize the mechanism behind the sparsification process, and find
surprising links to certain filter sparsification heuristics proposed in
literature. Emergence of, and the subsequent pruning of selective features is
observed to be one of the contributing mechanisms, leading to feature sparsity
at par or better than certain explicit sparsification / pruning approaches. In
this workshop article we summarize our findings, and point out corollaries of
selective-featurepenalization which could also be employed as heuristics for
filter pruning