---
comments: true
description: Learn how to prune YOLOv5 models for improved performance. Follow this step-by-step guide to optimize your YOLOv5 models effectively.
keywords: YOLOv5 pruning, model pruning, YOLOv5 optimization, YOLOv5 guide, machine learning pruning, model sparsity, neural network optimization
---

# Model Pruning and Sparsity in YOLOv5

📚 This guide explains how to apply **pruning** to YOLOv5 🚀 models to create more efficient networks while maintaining performance.

## What is Model Pruning?

[Model pruning](https://www.ultralytics.com/glossary/model-pruning) is a technique used to reduce the size and complexity of neural networks by removing less important parameters (weights and connections). This process creates a more efficient model with several benefits:

- Reduced model size for easier deployment on resource-constrained devices
- Faster inference speeds with minimal impact on accuracy
- Lower memory usage and energy consumption
- Improved overall efficiency for real-time applications

Pruning works by identifying and removing parameters that contribute minimally to the model's performance, resulting in a more lightweight model with similar accuracy.

## Before You Start

Clone repo and install [requirements.txt](https://github.com/ultralytics/yolov5/blob/master/requirements.txt) in a [**Python>=3.8.0**](https://www.python.org/) environment, including [**PyTorch>=1.8**](https://pytorch.org/get-started/locally/). [Models](https://github.com/ultralytics/yolov5/tree/master/models) and [datasets](https://github.com/ultralytics/yolov5/tree/master/data) download automatically from the latest YOLOv5 [release](https://github.com/ultralytics/yolov5/releases).

```bash
git clone https://github.com/ultralytics/yolov5 # clone
cd yolov5
pip install -r requirements.txt # install
```

## Test Baseline Performance

Before pruning, establish a baseline performance to compare against. This command tests YOLOv5x on COCO val2017 at image size 640 pixels. `yolov5x.pt` is the largest and most accurate model available. Other options are `yolov5s.pt`, `yolov5m.pt` and `yolov5l.pt`, or your own checkpoint from training a custom dataset `./weights/best.pt`. For details on all available models, see the README [table](https://github.com/ultralytics/yolov5#pretrained-checkpoints).

```bash
python val.py --weights yolov5x.pt --data coco.yaml --img 640 --half
```

Output:

```
val: data=/content/yolov5/data/coco.yaml, weights=['yolov5x.pt'], batch_size=32, imgsz=640, conf_thres=0.001, iou_thres=0.65, task=val, device=, workers=8, single_cls=False, augment=False, verbose=False, save_txt=False, save_conf=False, save_json=True, project=runs/val, name=exp, exist_ok=False, half=True, dnn=False
YOLOv5 🚀 v6.0-224-g4c40933 torch 1.10.0+cu111 CUDA:0 (Tesla V100-SXM2-16GB, 16160MiB)

Fusing layers...
Model Summary: 444 layers, 86705005 parameters, 0 gradients
val: Scanning '/content/datasets/coco/val2017.cache' images and labels... 4952 found, 48 missing, 0 empty, 0 corrupt: 100% 5000/5000 [00:00<?, ?it/s]
               Class     Images     Labels          P          R     mAP@.5 mAP@.5:.95: 100% 157/157 [01:12<00:00,  2.16it/s]
                 all       5000      36335      0.732      0.628      0.683      0.496
Speed: 0.1ms pre-process, 5.2ms inference, 1.7ms NMS per image at shape (32, 3, 640, 640)  # <--- base speed

Evaluating pycocotools mAP... saving runs/val/exp-2/yolov5x_predictions.json...
...
 Average Precision  (AP) @[ IoU=0.50:0.95 | area=   all | maxDets=100 ] = 0.507  # <--- base mAP
 Average Precision  (AP) @[ IoU=0.50      | area=   all | maxDets=100 ] = 0.689
 Average Precision  (AP) @[ IoU=0.75      | area=   all | maxDets=100 ] = 0.552
 Average Precision  (AP) @[ IoU=0.50:0.95 | area= small | maxDets=100 ] = 0.345
 Average Precision  (AP) @[ IoU=0.50:0.95 | area=medium | maxDets=100 ] = 0.559
 Average Precision  (AP) @[ IoU=0.50:0.95 | area= large | maxDets=100 ] = 0.652
 Average Recall     (AR) @[ IoU=0.50:0.95 | area=   all | maxDets=  1 ] = 0.381
 Average Recall     (AR) @[ IoU=0.50:0.95 | area=   all | maxDets= 10 ] = 0.630
 Average Recall     (AR) @[ IoU=0.50:0.95 | area=   all | maxDets=100 ] = 0.682
 Average Recall     (AR) @[ IoU=0.50:0.95 | area= small | maxDets=100 ] = 0.526
 Average Recall     (AR) @[ IoU=0.50:0.95 | area=medium | maxDets=100 ] = 0.731
 Average Recall     (AR) @[ IoU=0.50:0.95 | area= large | maxDets=100 ] = 0.829
Results saved to runs/val/exp
```

## Apply Pruning to YOLOv5x (30% Sparsity)

We can apply pruning to the model using the `torch_utils.prune()` command defined in `utils/torch_utils.py`. To test a pruned model, we update `val.py` to prune YOLOv5x to 0.3 sparsity (30% of weights set to zero):

<img width="894" alt="YOLOv5 model pruning to 30% sparsity code" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/ultralytics/assets@main/docs/sparsity-test-yolov5x-coco.avif">

30% pruned output:

```
val: data=/content/yolov5/data/coco.yaml, weights=['yolov5x.pt'], batch_size=32, imgsz=640, conf_thres=0.001, iou_thres=0.65, task=val, device=, workers=8, single_cls=False, augment=False, verbose=False, save_txt=False, save_conf=False, save_json=True, project=runs/val, name=exp, exist_ok=False, half=True, dnn=False
YOLOv5 🚀 v6.0-224-g4c40933 torch 1.10.0+cu111 CUDA:0 (Tesla V100-SXM2-16GB, 16160MiB)

Fusing layers...
Model Summary: 444 layers, 86705005 parameters, 0 gradients
Pruning model...  0.3 global sparsity
val: Scanning '/content/datasets/coco/val2017.cache' images and labels... 4952 found, 48 missing, 0 empty, 0 corrupt: 100% 5000/5000 [00:00<?, ?it/s]
               Class     Images     Labels          P          R     mAP@.5 mAP@.5:.95: 100% 157/157 [01:11<00:00,  2.19it/s]
                 all       5000      36335      0.724      0.614      0.671      0.478
Speed: 0.1ms pre-process, 5.2ms inference, 1.7ms NMS per image at shape (32, 3, 640, 640)  # <--- prune speed

Evaluating pycocotools mAP... saving runs/val/exp-3/yolov5x_predictions.json...
...
 Average Precision  (AP) @[ IoU=0.50:0.95 | area=   all | maxDets=100 ] = 0.489  # <--- prune mAP
 Average Precision  (AP) @[ IoU=0.50      | area=   all | maxDets=100 ] = 0.677
 Average Precision  (AP) @[ IoU=0.75      | area=   all | maxDets=100 ] = 0.537
 Average Precision  (AP) @[ IoU=0.50:0.95 | area= small | maxDets=100 ] = 0.334
 Average Precision  (AP) @[ IoU=0.50:0.95 | area=medium | maxDets=100 ] = 0.542
 Average Precision  (AP) @[ IoU=0.50:0.95 | area= large | maxDets=100 ] = 0.635
 Average Recall     (AR) @[ IoU=0.50:0.95 | area=   all | maxDets=  1 ] = 0.370
 Average Recall     (AR) @[ IoU=0.50:0.95 | area=   all | maxDets= 10 ] = 0.612
 Average Recall     (AR) @[ IoU=0.50:0.95 | area=   all | maxDets=100 ] = 0.664
 Average Recall     (AR) @[ IoU=0.50:0.95 | area= small | maxDets=100 ] = 0.496
 Average Recall     (AR) @[ IoU=0.50:0.95 | area=medium | maxDets=100 ] = 0.722
 Average Recall     (AR) @[ IoU=0.50:0.95 | area= large | maxDets=100 ] = 0.803
Results saved to runs/val/exp-3
```

## Results Analysis

From the results, we can observe:

- **30% sparsity achieved**: 30% of the model's weight parameters in `nn.Conv2d` layers are now zero
- **Inference time remains unchanged**: Despite pruning, the processing speed is essentially the same
- **Minimal performance impact**: mAP dropped slightly from 0.507 to 0.489 (only 3.6% reduction)
- **Model size reduction**: The pruned model requires less memory for storage

This demonstrates that pruning can significantly reduce model complexity with only a minor impact on performance, making it an effective optimization technique for deployment in resource-constrained environments.

## Fine-tuning Pruned Models

For best results, pruned models should be fine-tuned after pruning to recover accuracy. This can be done by:

1. Applying pruning with a desired sparsity level
2. Training the pruned model for a few epochs with a lower learning rate
3. Evaluating the fine-tuned pruned model against the baseline

This process helps the remaining parameters adapt to compensate for the removed connections, often recovering most or all of the original accuracy.

## Supported Environments

Ultralytics provides a range of ready-to-use environments, each pre-installed with essential dependencies such as [CUDA](https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda), [CUDNN](https://developer.nvidia.com/cudnn), [Python](https://www.python.org/), and [PyTorch](https://pytorch.org/), to kickstart your projects.

- **Free GPU Notebooks**: <a href="https://bit.ly/yolov5-paperspace-notebook"><img src="https://assets.paperspace.io/img/gradient-badge.svg" alt="Run on Gradient"></a> <a href="https://colab.research.google.com/github/ultralytics/yolov5/blob/master/tutorial.ipynb"><img src="https://colab.research.google.com/assets/colab-badge.svg" alt="Open In Colab"></a> <a href="https://www.kaggle.com/models/ultralytics/yolov5"><img src="https://kaggle.com/static/images/open-in-kaggle.svg" alt="Open In Kaggle"></a>
- **Google Cloud**: [GCP Quickstart Guide](../environments/google_cloud_quickstart_tutorial.md)
- **Amazon**: [AWS Quickstart Guide](../environments/aws_quickstart_tutorial.md)
- **Azure**: [AzureML Quickstart Guide](../environments/azureml_quickstart_tutorial.md)
- **Docker**: [Docker Quickstart Guide](../environments/docker_image_quickstart_tutorial.md) <a href="https://hub.docker.com/r/ultralytics/yolov5"><img src="https://img.shields.io/docker/pulls/ultralytics/yolov5?logo=docker" alt="Docker Pulls"></a>

## Project Status

<a href="https://github.com/ultralytics/yolov5/actions/workflows/ci-testing.yml"><img src="https://github.com/ultralytics/yolov5/actions/workflows/ci-testing.yml/badge.svg" alt="YOLOv5 CI"></a>

This badge indicates that all [YOLOv5 GitHub Actions](https://github.com/ultralytics/yolov5/actions) Continuous Integration (CI) tests are successfully passing. These CI tests rigorously check the functionality and performance of YOLOv5 across various key aspects: [training](https://github.com/ultralytics/yolov5/blob/master/train.py), [validation](https://github.com/ultralytics/yolov5/blob/master/val.py), [inference](https://github.com/ultralytics/yolov5/blob/master/detect.py), [export](https://github.com/ultralytics/yolov5/blob/master/export.py), and [benchmarks](https://github.com/ultralytics/yolov5/blob/master/benchmarks.py). They ensure consistent and reliable operation on macOS, Windows, and Ubuntu, with tests conducted every 24 hours and upon each new commit.
