MPNAS: Multimodal Sentiment Analysis Pruning via Neural Architecture Search

With the rapid development of social media, sentiment analysis from multimodal posts has garnered significant attention in recent years. However, the substantial size of these models impedes their deployment on resource-constrained embedded devices. Although pruning has been extensively studied to reduce the size of unimodal models, specific challenges remain for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) models. First, existing techniques prune fixed original models into sparse models, while our findings indicate that different model architectures of identical size yield varying performance outcomes. Second, prior studies fail to explore the unique characteristics of MSA models, resulting in suboptimal pruning performance. To address these challenges, we propose MPNAS, a unified pruning framework via Neural Architecture Search (NAS) for MSA models. Specifically, we formulate pruning as a NAS problem and analyze MSA model characteristics to guide the subnet search. We conduct an initial coarse-grained NAS on the original model, expanding the search space slightly to identify suitable subnets that enhance pruning rates and accuracy. Subsequently, we refine coarse-grained subnets in a fine-grained NAS stage, where MSA model characteristics guide the search process. Extensive experiments on three representative datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach over existing methods.