COEC (Calibrated Orthogonal-Equivalence Compensation) is a training‑free framework that improves structured pruning of large language models by applying alternating left and right orthogonal rotations to the retained weight matrix. The method optimizes the right rotation on a reduced Stiefel manifold, rescales singular values via generalized cross‑validation, tempers the calibration Gram matrix, and adds an alignment penalty to preserve geometric relations between attention projections. Experiments on Llama‑3, Llama‑3.1, and Qwen2.5 show that COEC consistently improves perplexity and zero‑shot accuracy across multiple sparsity levels, outperforming existing compensation techniques.
arXiv:2607. 17568v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Structured pruning compresses large language models (LLMs) by removing whole computational units, such as attention heads and feed-forward (FFN) channel groups.
SHIFT-LLM is a training‑free post‑pruning correction framework that inserts a Linear Residual Adapter (LRA) at each depth‑pruned site in large language models. Each LRA preserves the original residual identity while adding a lightweight affine correction calibrated via closed‑form least‑squares regression on a small held‑out set, thereby approximating the hidden state that would have been produced by the removed block. Experiments across multiple model families and benchmarks show that SHIFT‑LLM consistently recovers accuracy lost to depth pruning, achieving gains up to +15.7 points on Llama‑3.1‑8B‑Instruct with only a few hundred calibration samples and no gradient computation.
LILA (Latent-Informed Layer Analysis) introduces a calibration‑free method for structured pruning of large language models by scoring neuron importance using the Kolmogorov–Smirnov distance between singular value distributions of full and neuron‑ablated feed‑forward network weight matrices. The approach requires no training, calibration data, or auxiliary networks, and outperforms existing methods such as PruneNet and SliceGPT on LLaMA‑2‑7B and Phi‑2 at various sparsity levels. After a single epoch of LoRA fine‑tuning, LILA matches heavily calibrated baselines, and a Neural Tangent Kernel analysis provides theoretical support for its spectral importance criterion. Additionally, LILA can dynamically allocate sparsity budgets, achieving state‑of‑the‑art generative preservation and revealing architectural bottlenecks at higher compression.
Structured pruning compresses large language models (LLMs) by removing whole computational units, such as attention heads and feed-forward (FFN) channel groups. Most training-free methods, however, rank these units independently, implicitly treating the loss from pruning a set as the sum of its individual losses.
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are commonly used to interpret large language models, but their reliability after pruning is unclear. This study shows that pruning’s effect on an SAE is governed by perturbation energy, a covariance-weighted norm, and that magnitude pruning distorts the representation space by ignoring activation geometry. Activation-aware pruning methods such as Wanda and SparseGPT better preserve SAE behavior, and the authors find that middle layers are especially vulnerable, leading them to propose a layer‑wise sparsity allocation that reduces perplexity for a given sparsity level.
arXiv:2608. 06630v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pruning reduces the inference cost of large language models, but existing criteria primarily preserve large activations or reconstruct layer outputs.
arXiv:2608. 06901v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable generalization across diverse multimodal tasks through large-scale pre-training, yet their rapidly increasing computational and memory requirements pose significant challenges for deployment in constrained environments.
Magnitude Profile Pruning introduces a training‑free, calibration‑free method for removing attention heads in Transformer models by statistically detecting outliers in weight row norms. Heads whose projection weights fall within the bulk of the distribution are pruned, while outlier heads are retained. Across several models, the MP‑G variant achieves superior perplexity at various sparsity levels and yields significant parameter and FLOP reductions without requiring forward passes, calibration data, or gradient computations.
arXiv:2606. 01544v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) in practice incurs substantial memory and computational costs.
arXiv:2601. 16991v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Adapting large pre-trained language models to downstream tasks often entails fine-tuning millions of parameters or deploying costly dense weight updates, which hinders their use in resource-constrained environments.
arXiv:2607. 22587v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance across diverse tasks but their deployment is constrained by the memory and compute cost of their parameters.
arXiv:2504.04342v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Scaling up model parameters and training data consistently improves the performance of large language models (LLMs), but at the cost of rapidly gro...