A Survey on Deep Neural Network Pruning-Taxonomy, Comparison, Analysis,
  and Recommendations
Hongrong Cheng Miao Zhang Javen Qinfeng Shi
Modern deep neural networks, particularly recent large language models, come
with massive model sizes that require significant computational and storage
resources. To enable the deployment of modern models on resource-constrained
environments and accelerate inference time, researchers have increasingly
explored pruning techniques as a popular research direction in neural network
compression. However, there is a dearth of up-to-date comprehensive review
papers on pruning. To address this issue, in this survey, we provide a
comprehensive review of existing research works on deep neural network pruning
in a taxonomy of 1) universal/specific speedup, 2) when to prune, 3) how to
prune, and 4) fusion of pruning and other compression techniques. We then
provide a thorough comparative analysis of seven pairs of contrast settings for
pruning (e.g., unstructured/structured) and explore emerging topics, including
post-training pruning, different levels of supervision for pruning, and broader
applications (e.g., adversarial robustness) to shed light on the commonalities
and differences of existing methods and lay the foundation for further method
development. To facilitate future research, we build a curated collection of
datasets, networks, and evaluations on different applications. Finally, we
provide some valuable recommendations on selecting pruning methods and prospect
promising research directions. We build a repository at
https://github.com/hrcheng1066/awesome-pruning.