The Sparsity Whisperer
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: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: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.
arXiv:2603. 13418v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Structured pruning is widely applied to compress large language models (LLMs), but its performance depends heavily on how neuron importance is estimated.
arXiv:2509. 14230v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While structured pruning presents a highly effective pathway for accelerating Large Language Model (LLM) inference, existing methods frequently suffer from significant performance degradation and demand computationally retraining to recover capabilities.
arXiv:2606. 01544v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) in practice incurs substantial memory and computational costs.
arXiv:2507. 01900v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Pruning is a highly effective approach for compressing large language models (LLMs), significantly reducing inference latency.
Deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) in practice incurs substantial memory and computational costs. Post-training pruning (PTP) is an effective approach to reducing these costs by removing weights without additional training.
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.
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...
arXiv:2512.20636v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Many self-attention sublayers in large language models (LLMs) can be removed with little to no loss. We attribute this to the Attention Suppr...
arXiv:2504. 21174v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Deep learning drives a new wave in computing systems and triggers the automation of increasingly complex problems.
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.