Model pruning is a performance optimization technique for large language models like R1 or o3-mini. However, existing pruning methods often lead to significant performance degradation or require extensive retraining and fine-tuning. This technique aims to identify and remove neurons, connections unlikely leading to the contribution during the human-computer interaction phase. Our goal is to obtain a much smaller and faster knowledge distilled model that can quickly generate content almost as good as those of the unpruned ones. We propose MAMA Pruning, short for Movement and Magnitude Analysis, an improved pruning method that effectively reduces model size and computational complexity while maintaining performance comparable to the original unpruned model even at extreme pruned levels. The improved method is based on weights, bias fixed in the pre-training phase and GRPO rewards verified during the post-training phase as our novel pruning indicators. Preliminary experimental results show that our method outperforms and be comparable to state-of-the-art methods across various pruning levels and different downstream computational linguistics tasks.

Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) offer robust uncertainty quantification in model predictions, but training them presents a significant computational challenge. This is mainly due to the problem of sampling multimodal posterior distributions using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling and variational inference algorithms. Moreover, the number of model parameters scales exponentially with additional hidden layers, neurons, and features in the dataset. Typically, a significant portion of these densely connected parameters are redundant and pruning a neural network not only improves portability but also has the potential for better generalisation capabilities. In this study, we address some of the challenges by leveraging MCMC sampling with network pruning to obtain compact probabilistic models having removed redundant parameters. We sample the posterior distribution of model parameters (weights and biases) and prune weights with low importance, resulting in a compact model. We ensure that the compact BNN retains its ability to estimate uncertainty via the posterior distribution while retaining the model training and generalisation performance accuracy by adapting post-pruning resampling. We evaluate the effectiveness of our MCMC pruning strategy on selected benchmark datasets for regression and classification problems through empirical result analysis. We also consider two coral reef drill-core lithology classification datasets to test the robustness of the pruning model in complex real-world datasets. We further investigate if refining compact BNN can retain any loss of performance. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of training and pruning BNNs using MCMC whilst retaining generalisation performance with over 75% reduction in network size. This paves the way for developing compact BNN models that provide uncertainty estimates for real-world applications.

By leveraging attention in recent years due to their impressive this numerical text quality score, we demonstrate performance in various natural language processing how it can be used to prune the original dataset, (NLP) tasks (Zhang et al., 2022; Penedo et al., enabling the training of LMs using only a fraction 2023; Touvron et al., 2023; Zhou et al., 2023; Liu of the data. Our approach aims to identify et al., 2019). However, their training process often and eliminate low-quality text instances, thereby relies on computationally intensive procedures that streamlining the training process and mitigating the involve massive datasets and compute requirements burden of handling large-scale datasets. We also remove which hinders training large scale LMs on noisy potentially harmful content from the data by real-world or domain specific datasets. What's ensuring that harmful content is rated poorly by our worse is that several of these datasets are uncurated text quality score which can then be pruned. We and may contain harmful content which the observe an absolute improvement of 0.9% averaged LM model can potentially pick up during the training over 14 downstream evaluation tasks for multiple process (Deshpande et al., 2023; Schramowski LM models while using 40% lesser data and training et al., 2022; Kuchnik et al., 2023).

It is evident that Machine Learning (ML) has touched all walks of our lives! From checking the weather forecast to applying for a loan or a credit card, ML is used in almost every aspect of our daily life. In this chapter, ML is explored in terms of algorithms and applications. Special consideration is given to ML applications in the financial data analytics domain including stock market analysis, fraud detection in financial transactions, credit risk analysis, loan defaulting rate analysis, and profit–loss analysis. The chapter establishes the significance of Random Forests as an effective machine learning method for a wide variety of financial applications.

The increased memory and processing capabilities of today's edge devices create opportunities for greater edge intelligence. In the domain of vision, the ability to adapt a Convolutional Neural Network's (CNN) structure and parameters to the input data distribution leads to systems with lower memory footprint, latency and power consumption. However, due to the limited compute resources and memory budget on edge devices, it is necessary for the system to be able to predict the latency and memory footprint of the training process in order to identify favourable training configurations of the network topology and device combination for efficient network adaptation. This work proposes perf4sight, an automated methodology for developing accurate models that predict CNN training memory footprint and latency given a target device and network. This enables rapid identification of network topologies that can be retrained on the edge device with low resource consumption. With PyTorch as the framework and NVIDIA Jetson TX2 as the target device, the developed models predict training memory footprint and latency with 95% and 91% accuracy respectively for a wide range of networks, opening the path towards efficient network adaptation on edge GPUs.

Unseen or out-of-domain data can seriously degrade the performance of a neural network model, indicating the model's failure to generalize to unseen data. Neural net pruning can not only help to reduce a model's size but can improve the model's generalization capacity as well. Pruning approaches look for low-salient neurons that are less contributive to a model's decision and hence can be removed from the model. This work investigates if pruning approaches are successful in detecting neurons that are either high-salient (mostly active or hyper) or low-salient (barely active or hypo), and whether removal of such neurons can help to improve the model's generalization capacity. Traditional blind adaptation techniques update either the whole or a subset of layers, but have never explored selectively updating individual neurons across one or more layers. Focusing on the fully connected layers of a convolutional neural network (CNN), this work shows that it may be possible to selectively adapt certain neurons (consisting of the hyper and the hypo neurons) first, followed by a full-network fine tuning. Using the task of automatic speech recognition, this work demonstrates how the removal of hyper and hypo neurons from a model can improve the model's performance on out-of-domain speech data and how selective neuron adaptation can ensure improved performance when compared to traditional blind model adaptation.