Investigation and analysis of hyper and hypo neuron pruning to selectively update neurons during unsupervised adaptation

Abstract Unseen or out-of-domain data can seriously degrade the performance of a neural network model, indicating the model's failure to generalize to unseen data. Neural net pruning can not only help to reduce a model's size but can improve the model's generalization capacity as well. Pruning approaches look for low-salient neurons that are less contributive to a model's decision and hence can be removed from the model. This work investigates if pruning approaches are successful in detecting neurons that are either high-salient (mostly active or hyper) or low-salient (barely active or hypo), and whether removal of such neurons can help to improve the model's generalization capacity. Traditional blind adaptation techniques update either the whole or a subset of layers, but have never explored selectively updating individual neurons across one or more layers. Focusing on the fully connected layers of a convolutional neural network (CNN), this work shows that it may be possible to selectively adapt certain neurons (consisting of the hyper and the hypo neurons) first, followed by a full-network fine tuning. Using the task of automatic speech recognition, this work demonstrates how the removal of hyper and hypo neurons from a model can improve the model's performance on out-of-domain speech data and how selective neuron adaptation can ensure improved performance when compared to traditional blind model adaptation.