arXiv:2607.27031cs.LGcs.CV2026-07

稀疏模型虽能保持精度,但替换上线模型会改变决策逻辑,无法真正“即插即用”。

Lottery Tickets Are Not Deployment Tickets

  • 在实际部署中测试稀疏模型能否直接替换密集模型而不改动下游决策规则
  • 稀疏模型虽精度相当,但在校准、异常检测等行为上仍与原模型有显著差异
  • 即使精度匹配,决策变化率高达7%~10%,不适用于希望零成本替换的场景

关于稀疏化、压缩和彩票票券(Lottery Tickets)如何影响模型行为的研究结论不一:一些研究发现有益,另一些则发现有害。此外,以往工作未考虑实际部署场景——即下游决策逻辑已固定。为从实用角度评估这些矛盾结果,我们研究了部署层级的“替代性”问题:一个精度相当的稀疏候选模型(如彩票票券)能否在不重配置下游决策逻辑的情况下替换现有密集模型。为此,我们审计了涵盖校准、分布外响应、类别可靠性、表征及下游策略决策的一系列部署相关行为,并以“行为兼容距离”总结排除干净精度后的偏差。大量实验表明,尽管稀疏候选模型能恢复密集参考模型的准确率,其行为仍明显不同;在若干设定下,彩票票券甚至表现出更低的抗扰动准确率。在小差距设置且采用固定阈值策略诊断时,彩票票券替换导致7%至10%的接受-审核决策变更。这种决策变动恰好是即插即用替换所试图避免的问题:需重新配置并重新验证下游决策逻辑。这些发现揭示了纯精度认证的局限性:与固定模型兼容不同于将变动归因于稀疏性,也非所有偏差都应视为有害。我们的理论解释了路由结果:即使逐点预测完全一致,也无法约束固定阈值下的决策变化;靠近操作边界的微小置信度波动即可引发一阶路由变动。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Reports on how sparsification, compression, and lottery tickets change model behavior have been mixed in the prior literature, with beneficial effects observed in some studies and adverse effects in others. Moreover, prior work has not considered actual deployment conditions, where decision logic is already fixed for the incumbent. To assess these mixed findings from a practical standpoint, we study the production-replacement question at the deployment level, namely whether an accuracy-matched lottery ticket or another sparse challenger can replace an incumbent dense model without reconfiguring downstream decision logic. We therefore audit a broad, protocol-specific panel of deployment-relevant behaviors spanning calibration, OOD response, class-level reliability, representations, and downstream policy decisions, and summarize clean-accuracy-excluded deviations with a behavioral-compatibility distance. Across extensive experiments, sparse candidates repeatedly recover dense-reference accuracy yet remain behaviorally different; in several study-band-matched settings, LTs also show lower corruption accuracy. In small-gap settings with fixed-threshold policy diagnostics, lottery-ticket replacement changes 7% to 10% of accept--review decisions. This churn creates precisely the burden that drop-in replacement is meant to avoid: reconfiguring and revalidating downstream decision logic. These findings establish the limits of clean-accuracy certification: Establishing compatibility with a fixed incumbent is distinct from attributing churn uniquely to sparsity or treating every measured deviation as harmful. Our theory explains the routing result: Even exact pointwise top-1 agreement cannot bound fixed-threshold decision changes, and small confidence shifts near the operating boundary can generate first-order routing churn.

模型压缩部署兼容决策一致性

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