Pruning neural networks for wiring length efficiency is considered. Three techniques are proposed and experimentally tested: distance-based regularization, nested-rank pruning, and layer-by-layer bipartite matching. The first two algorithms are used in the training and pruning phases, respectively, and the third is used in the arranging neurons phase. Experiments show that distance-based regularization with weight based pruning tends to perform the best, with or without layer-by-layer bipartite matching. These results suggest that these techniques may be useful in creating neural networks for implementation in widely deployed specialized circuits.
Three new algorithms with ablation studies to prune neural network to optimize for wiring length, as opposed to number of remaining weights.