Absolutely. Pruning can decrease overall accuracy. The challenge is to prune as aggressively as possible while keeping accuracy as high as possible. It's certa

Absolutely. Pruning can decrease overall accuracy. The challenge is to prune as aggressively as possible while keeping accuracy as high as possible. It's certainly not an operation that is expected to have no effect. It should be noted that there are methods for training the network to encourage these prunable neurons, eg sparsity penalties.