Miniaturized Graph Convolutional Networks with Topologically Consistent
  Pruning
Hichem Sahbi
Magnitude pruning is one of the mainstream methods in lightweight
architecture design whose goal is to extract subnetworks with the largest
weight connections. This method is known to be successful, but under very high
pruning regimes, it suffers from topological inconsistency which renders the
extracted subnetworks disconnected, and this hinders their generalization
ability. In this paper, we devise a novel magnitude pruning method that allows
extracting subnetworks while guarantying their topological consistency. The
latter ensures that only accessible and co-accessible -- impactful --
connections are kept in the resulting lightweight networks. Our solution is
based on a novel reparametrization and two supervisory bi-directional networks
which implement accessibility/co-accessibility and guarantee that only
connected subnetworks will be selected during training. This solution allows
enhancing generalization significantly, under very high pruning regimes, as
corroborated through extensive experiments, involving graph convolutional
networks, on the challenging task of skeleton-based action recognition.