We present Spartan, a method for training sparse neural network models with a predetermined level of sparsity. Spartan is based on a combination of two techniques: (1) soft top-k masking of low-magnitude parameters via a regularized optimal transportation problem and (2) dual averaging-based parameter updates with hard sparsification in the forward pass. This scheme realizes an exploration-exploitation tradeoff: early in training, the learner is able to explore various sparsity patterns, and as the soft top-k approximation is gradually sharpened over the course of training, the balance shifts towards parameter optimization with respect to a fixed sparsity mask. Spartan is sufficiently flexible to accommodate a variety of sparsity allocation policies, including both unstructured and block-structured sparsity, global and per-layer sparsity budgets, as well as general cost-sensitive sparsity allocation mediated by linear models of per-parameter costs. On ImageNet-1K classification, we demonstrate that training with Spartan yields 95% sparse ResNet-50 models and 90% block sparse ViT-B/16 models while incurring absolute top-1 accuracy losses of less than 1% compared to fully dense training.

We present Spartan, a method for training sparse neural network models with a predetermined level of sparsity.

We present Spartan, a method for training sparse neural network models with a predetermined level of sparsity.

Causal structures play a central role in world models that flexibly adapt to changes in the environment. While recent works motivate the benefits of discovering local causal graphs for dynamics modelling, in this work we demonstrate that accurately capturing these relationships in complex settings remains challenging for the current state-of-the-art. To remedy this shortcoming, we postulate that sparsity is a critical ingredient for the discovery of such local causal structures. To this end we present the SPARse TrANsformer World model (SPARTAN), a Transformer-based world model that learns local causal structures between entities in a scene. By applying sparsity regularisation on the attention pattern between object-factored tokens, SPARTAN identifies sparse local causal models that accurately predict future object states. Furthermore, we extend our model to capture sparse interventions with unknown targets on the dynamics of the environment. This results in a highly interpretable world model that can efficiently adapt to changes. Empirically, we evaluate SPARTAN against the current state-of-the-art in object-centric world models on observation-based environments and demonstrate that our model can learn accurate local causal graphs and achieve significantly improved few-shot adaptation to changes in the dynamics of the environment as well as robustness against removing irrelevant distractors.

We present Spartan, a method for training sparse neural network models with a predetermined level of sparsity. Spartan is based on a combination of two techniques: (1) soft top-k masking of low-magnitude parameters via a regularized optimal transportation problem and (2) dual averaging-based parameter updates with hard sparsification in the forward pass. This scheme realizes an exploration-exploitation tradeoff: early in training, the learner is able to explore various sparsity patterns, and as the soft top-k approximation is gradually sharpened over the course of training, the balance shifts towards parameter optimization with respect to a fixed sparsity mask. Spartan is sufficiently flexible to accommodate a variety of sparsity allocation policies, including both unstructured and block-structured sparsity, global and per-layer sparsity budgets, as well as general cost-sensitive sparsity allocation mediated by linear models of per-parameter costs. On ImageNet-1K classification, we demonstrate that training with Spartan yields 95% sparse ResNet-50 models and 90% block sparse ViT-B/16 models while incurring absolute top-1 accuracy losses of less than 1% compared to fully dense training.

Fine-tuning pre-trained language models (PLMs) achieves impressive performance on a range of downstream tasks, and their sizes have consequently been getting bigger. Since a different copy of the model is required for each task, this paradigm is infeasible for storage-constrained edge devices like mobile phones. In this paper, we propose SPARTAN, a parameter efficient (PE) and computationally fast architecture for edge devices that adds hierarchically organized sparse memory after each Transformer layer. SPARTAN freezes the PLM parameters and fine-tunes only its memory, thus significantly reducing storage costs by re-using the PLM backbone for different tasks. SPARTAN contains two levels of memory, with only a sparse subset of parents being chosen in the first level for each input, and children cells corresponding to those parents being used to compute an output representation. This sparsity combined with other architecture optimizations improves SPARTAN's throughput by over 90% during inference on a Raspberry Pi 4 when compared to PE baselines (adapters) while also outperforming the latter by 0.1 points on the GLUE benchmark. Further, it can be trained 34% faster in a few-shot setting, while performing within 0.9 points of adapters. Qualitative analysis shows that different parent cells in SPARTAN specialize in different topics, thus dividing responsibility efficiently.

We present Spartan, a method for training sparse neural network models with a predetermined level of sparsity. Spartan is based on a combination of two techniques: (1) soft top-k masking of low-magnitude parameters via a regularized optimal transportation problem and (2) dual averaging-based parameter updates with hard sparsification in the forward pass. This scheme realizes an exploration-exploitation tradeoff: early in training, the learner is able to explore various sparsity patterns, and as the soft top-k approximation is gradually sharpened over the course of training, the balance shifts towards parameter optimization with respect to a fixed sparsity mask. Spartan is sufficiently flexible to accommodate a variety of sparsity allocation policies, including both unstructured and block structured sparsity, as well as general cost-sensitive sparsity allocation mediated by linear models of per-parameter costs. On ImageNet-1K classification, Spartan yields 95% sparse ResNet-50 models and 90% block sparse ViT-B/16 models while incurring absolute top-1 accuracy losses of less than 1% compared to fully dense training.

Your browser does not support the video element. The hero of the Halo video game franchise, Master Chief, made his debut in 2001 in the game "Halo: Combat Evolved" for the original Xbox game console. In the time since, he has become Microsoft's version of Mario, though just a bit grittier. The Chief, in his iconic green armor, and his fellow superhuman Spartans are more juggernauts than soldiers. Weighing a half-ton, and able to absorb anything short of a tank shell, the armor includes technological enhancements that improve everything from vision to reflexes, turning Spartans into the ultimate weapons.