Transfer Learning for Structured Pruning under Limited Task Data

Pre-trained models are growing increasingly large which can be problematic for applications with strong inference constraints. Fortunately, task-aware structured pruning offers a solution. While existing pruning algorithms can be efficient, the common practical setting where task-specific data is limited is yet to be addressed. To ameliorate the data scarcity problem, we propose a structured pruning strategy that leverages transfer learning. Detailed analyses of simple transfer learning based remedies lead us to a simple, flexible formulation of what, how and when to transfer, resulting in pruned models with improved generalization over strong baselines.