I find the technique very similar to the one presented in [1] from 2018, and I can't seem to find a ref to this paper in theirs.

Another interesting and very related paper [2] that they fail to mention also shows improvement in training time (epochs) with dynamic pruning

And for the ones who wondered how far this is going back time I suggest you to read this one [3]

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04316-3

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.04493

[3] https://papers.nips.cc/paper/323-generalization-by-weight-el...