DADP: Dynamic Activity-Dependent Pruning, A Reverse Hebbian-Inspired Structural Pruning Method

Abstract

Modern neural networks are heavily over-parameterized. This redundancy incurs substantial compute and memory overhead during training and inference. Existing pruning methods rely on post-hoc magnitude thresholds or static initialization heuristics. Consequently, they often require manual per-layer sparsity targets or expensive retraining cycles. We propose Dynamic Activity-Dependent Pruning (DADP), a biologically inspired structural plasticity mechanism. During training, DADP measures connection importance via the accumulated product of pre-synaptic activations and post-synaptic error gradients. Using a single global threshold instead of fixed layer budgets, DADP dynamically allocates sparsity across network depth while naturally inducing neuron- and channel-level pruning. Across MLP, VGG-16, ResNet-18, BiLSTM-CRF, and MiniBERT architectures, DADP matches or outperforms Magnitude, SNIP and RigL, retaining 73.67% accuracy (dense baseline: 76.06%) at 99% sparsity on ResNet-18. Finally, matrix-based Shannon entropy and effective rank measurements confirm that DADP preserves latent feature diversity at extreme sparsities without representation collapse.