Lottery tickets on the other hand are configurations of weights that rival the full network in performance when both are trained from scratch, with the ticket having far fewer parameters to optimize. Pruning is only the method to find the tickets for now, but the ideal would be to have a weight init strategy that can create winning tickets in one-shot. There is work being done on this front, and also to see if winning tickets for one image classification task generalize to image classification as a whole. This would do a lot to reduce the size of networks from the start, and so far results are promising.
But yes, this is all very specific to neural networks. Do you have a blog or other place where you post about some of the things you’re working on? It would be nice to read about.