Abstract. Facial expression recognition (FER) models can be used to automatically detect a person’s emotions based on an image of their face. In this work we create a FER model by fine-tuning an ImageNetpretrained ResNet-18 on the Static Facial Expression in the Wild (SFEW) dataset. We aim to investigate how well network pruning methods can function on this fine-tuned FER model. We compare the performance of two different pruning algorithms, magnitude pruning and distinctiveness pruning, and find that magnitude pruning performs significantly better. In-fact, we find that after pruning away 50% of the weights in the network, the network can continue to be trained and reach an even higher test accuracy (66.14%) compared to the original full model (63.36%). In addition, in order to confirm that the lottery hypothesis still holds for fine-tuned networks, we perform experiments where un-pruned weights are re-initialized to their original pre-trained value after pruning. Our experiments successfully demonstrate that there exist subnetworks in the pre-trained ResNet with as little at 5% of the total weights in the full network which can be successfully trained to the same performance as the full model.