OTOV2: Automatic, Generic, User-Friendly

Tianyi Chen, Luming Liang, Tian Ding, Zhihui Zhu, Ilya Zharkov
2/12/2026

No official code found. Best implementation: tianyic/only_train_once_personal_footprint (311 stars, MIT, PyTorch, last commit 2024-09-16).

Abstract

The existing model compression methods via structured pruning typically require complicated multi-stage procedures. Each individual stage necessitates numerous engineering efforts and domain-knowledge from the end-users which prevent their wider applications onto broader scenarios. We propose the second generation of Only-Train-Once (OTOv2), which first automatically trains and compresses a general DNN only once from scratch to produce a more compact model with competitive performance without fine-tuning. OTOv2 is automatic and pluggable into various deep learning applications, and requires almost minimal engineering efforts from the users. Methodologically, OTOv2 proposes two major improvements: (i) Autonomy: automatically exploits the dependency of general DNNs, partitions the trainable variables into Zero-Invariant Groups (ZIGs), and constructs the compressed model; and (ii) Dual Half-Space Projected Gradient (DHSPG): a novel optimizer to more reliably solve structured-sparsity problems. Numerically, we demonstrate the generality and autonomy of OTOv2 on a variety of model architectures such as VGG, ResNet, CARN, ConvNeXt, DenseNet and StackedUnets, the majority of which cannot be handled by other methods without extensive handcrafting efforts. Together with benchmark datasets including CIFAR10/100, DIV2K, Fashion-MNIST, SVNH and ImageNet, its effectiveness is validated by performing competitively or even better than the state-of-the-arts. The source code is available at https://github.com/tianyic/only_train_once.

View on arXivView PDF

Code Implementations(1)

PyTorchMIT

OTOv1-v3, NeurIPS, ICLR, TMLR, DNN Training, Compression, Structured Pruning, Erasing Operators, CNN, Diffusion, LLM

31147Python, Jupyter NotebookOct 19, 20212 years agoMIT
automldeep-learningerasing-operatorsmodel-compressionone-shot+4 more

Similar Papers

Cite this paper

@article{chen2026otov,
  title  = {OTOV2: Automatic, Generic, User-Friendly},
  author = {Tianyi Chen and Luming Liang and Tian Ding and Zhihui Zhu and Ilya Zharkov},
  year   = {2026},
  eprint = {2303.06862},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url    = {http://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.06862},
  journal = {ICLR 2023 2023}
}

Add a badge to your README

Shows whether official code is linked for this paper.

Code of Paper badge
[![Code of Paper](https://codeofpaper.com/badge/2303.06862.svg)](https://codeofpaper.com/paper/2303.06862)

Discussion