Title: Variational Dropout Sparsifies Deep Neural Networks,
Abstract: We explore a recently proposed Variational Dropout technique that provided an
elegant Bayesian interpretation to Gaussian Dropout. We extend Variational
Dropout to the case when dropout rates are unbounded, propose a way to reduce
the variance of the gradient estimator and report first experimental results
with individual dropout rates per weight. Interestingly, it leads to extremely
sparse solutions both in fully-connected and convolutional layers. This effect
is similar to automatic relevance determination effect in empirical Bayes but
has a number of advantages. We reduce the number of parameters up to 280 times
on LeNet architectures and up to 68 times on VGG-like networks with a
negligible decrease of accuracy.