Important Dates

• June 15, 2021 [AOE time]: Submit an abstract and supporting materials
• June 25, 2021: Notification of acceptance
• July 8-9, 2021: Workshop

Topics (including but not limited to)

• Algorithms for Sparsity
• Pruning both for post-training inference, and during training
• Algorithms for fully sparse training (fixed or dynamic), including biologically inspired algorithms
• Algorithms for ephemeral (activation) sparsity
• Scaling up sparsity (e.g., large sparsely activated expert models)
• Systems for Sparsity
• Libraries, kernels, and compilers for accelerating sparse computation
• Hardware with support for sparse computation
• Theory and Science of Sparsity
• When is overparameterization necessary (or not)
• Optimization behavior of sparse networks
• Representation ability of sparse networks
• Sparsity and generalization
• The stability of sparse models
• Forgetting owing to sparsity, including fairness, privacy and bias concerns
• Connecting neural network sparsity with traditional sparse dictionary modeling
• Applications for Sparsity
• Resource-efficient learning at the edge or the cloud
• Data-efficient learning for sparse models
• Communication-efficient distributed or federated learning with sparse models 
• Graph and network science applications

• Accept (Spotlight Presentation). The authors will be invited to present the work during the main conference, with live Q&A.
• Accept (Poster Presentation). The authors will be invited to present their work as a poster during the workshop’s interactive poster sessions.
• Reject. The paper will not be presented at the workshop.

Eligible Work

• The latest research innovations at all stages of the research process, from work-in-progress to recently published papers
• We define “recent” as presented within one year of the workshop, e.g., the manuscript is first publicly available on arxiv or else no earlier than July 9, 2020.
• Position or survey papers on any topics relevant to this workshop (see above)

1. One mandatory abstract (250 words or fewer) describing the work
2. One or more of the following accompanying materials that describe the work in further detail. Higher quality accompanying materials improve the likelihood of acceptance and of spotlighting work with an oral presentation.
1. A poster (in PDF form) presenting results of work-in-progress.
2. A link to a blog post (e.g., distill.pub, Medium) describing results.
3. A workshop paper of approximately four pages in length presenting results of work-in-progress. Papers should be submitted using the NeurIPS 2021 format.
4. A position paper with no page limit.
5. A published paper in the form that it was published. We will only consider papers that were published in the year prior to this workshop.

On behalf of the organizer team (Ari, Atlas, Jonathan, Utku, Michela, Siddhant, Elena, Chang, Trevor, Decebal, and Erich)