This is the idea behind "Learning both Weights and Connections for Efficient Neural Networks (2015)", and yes, it works: https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.02626 https:

This is the idea behind "Learning both Weights and Connections for Efficient Neural Networks (2015)", and yes, it works: https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.02626 https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.02626 How to figure out which ones are useful and which ones aren't? Why, you can try the simplest thing that could possibly work. Quoting the paper: "All connections with weights below a threshold are removed from the network". Is that all? Yes it is.