#pruning

Jan 26, 2026 · The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis

In 2019, Frankle and Carlin published a paper https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.03635 that challenged a fundamental assumption in deep learning: that large, over-parameterized networks are necessary for achieving good performance. They proposed the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis, which states that dense, randomly initialized networks contain sparse subnetworks (winning tickets) that, when trained in isolation from the same initialization, can match the full network's accuracy.