Towards Scalable Lottery Ticket Networks using Genetic Algorithms

Building modern deep learning systems that are not just effective but also efficient requires rethinking established paradigms for model training and neural architecture design. Instead of adapting highly overparameterized networks and subsequently applying model compression techniques to reduce resource consumption, a new class of high-performing networks skips the need for expensive parameter updates, while requiring only a fraction of parameters, making them highly scalable. The Strong Lottery Ticket Hypothesis posits that within randomly initialized, sufficiently overparameterized neural networks, there exist subnetworks that can match the accuracy of the trained original model--without any training. This work explores the usage of genetic algorithms for identifying these strong lottery ticket subnetworks. We find that for instances of binary and multi-class classification tasks, our approach achieves better accuracies and sparsity levels than the current state-of-the-art without requiring any gradient information. In addition, we provide justification for the need for appropriate evaluation metrics when scaling to more complex network architectures and learning tasks. Keywords: Strong Lottery Ticket Hypothesis Evolutionary Optimization Neu-roevolution Neural Architecture Search Loss Landscape Analysis Pruning.An earlier version of this work was presented at the International Conference on Neural Computation Theory and Applications (NCT A 2024) [1]. This article extends our conference paper with updates to the method to improve multi-class classification, an expanded experimental setup, and a multi-class performance anaylsis with visual and analytical justifications.