> wondered if there was a way to strip all unused/unlikely paths out of a network to reduce size and increase performance. Sure there is, it is called "pruning

> wondered if there was a way to strip all unused/unlikely paths out of a network to reduce size and increase performance. Sure there is, it is called "pruning". You can easily find works on this with your favorite search engine. "Distillation" is another interesting technique to make models smaller. These techniques are applied after training, to reduce the size of a big network. I don't know any method that can be applied _before_ training, just by inspecting the network.