Uncovering the impact of hyperparameters for global magnitude pruning

A common paradigm in model pruning is to train a model, prune, and then either fine-tune or, in the lottery ticket framework, reinitialize and retrain. Prior work has implicitly assumed that the best training configuration for model evaluation is also the best configuration for mask discovery. However, what if a training configuration which yields worse performance actually yields a mask which trains to higher performance? To test this, we decoupled the hyperparameters for mask discovery (H_find) and mask evaluation (H_eval). Using unstructured magnitude pruning on vision classification tasks, we discovered the "decoupled find-eval phenomenon," in which certain H_find values lead to models which have lower performance, but generate masks with substantially higher eventual performance compared to using the same hyperparameters for both stages. We show that this phenomenon holds across a number of models, datasets, configurations, and also for one-shot structured pruning. Finally, we demonstrate that different H_find values yield masks with materially different layerwise pruning ratios and that the decoupled find-eval phenomenon is causally mediated by these ratios. Our results demonstrate the practical utility of decoupling hyperparameters and provide clear insights into the mechanisms underlying this counterintuitive effect.