The paper demonstrates that layer dropout, also known as stochastic depth, can be effectively used in state‑of‑the‑art large language model (LLM) training. By optimizing the layer distribution, schedule, and optimizer settings, the authors show that layer dropout can reduce training loss while saving up to 25 % of training FLOPs. Additionally, layer dropout enables post‑training optimizations such as early exit and self‑speculative decoding, achieving up to 1.5× inference speedup with negligible accuracy loss across models ranging from 271 M to 8.2 B parameters and datasets up to 160 B tokens.
arXiv:2609.06557v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are often considered fragile under aggressive sparsification, and maintaining reliable performance typically requires stic...
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.
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...
The paper introduces LADDER, a method for post‑training pruning of large language models that allocates sparsity incrementally across layers to minimize end‑to‑end degradation per removed parameter. LADDER produces non‑uniform sparsity profiles and nested masks for multiple budgets, and is evaluated on five OPT, Llama, and Qwen models at 10–90% sparsity using SparseGPT. Results show that while LADDER is comparable to uniform and adaptive baselines at low sparsity, it becomes substantially more robust from 70% sparsity onward, a benefit that largely persists after posterior distillation and improves zero‑shot accuracy retention.
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...
The paper argues that relying solely on zero‑shot task accuracy is insufficient for evaluating quantized large language models (LLMs) because accuracy ignores changes in the full predictive distribution. It proposes a distribution‑sensitive framework that measures fidelity loss by computing statistical distances—such as Jensen‑Shannon Divergence and Total Variation Distance—between the full‑vocabulary output distributions of a full‑precision BF16 reference and its quantized counterparts. Experiments across five foundation architectures and four reasoning benchmarks show that these divergence metrics increase with stronger quantization, revealing distributional drift that top‑1 accuracy fails to capture, and suggest that mixed‑precision Q4_K schemes can offer lower divergence than uniform Q4_0 at comparable memory usage.
arXiv:2606. 01155v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scaling laws for dense LLMs under infinite data are well explored, but how sparsity interacts with limited data is not.
arXiv:2605. 18331v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have experienced significant growth and development in recent years.
The paper investigates how data repetition affects Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models compared to dense Transformers. Across models from 80 M to 1 B active parameters, MoEs degrade more quickly as data is repeated, with performance dropping significantly beyond 4× repetition and overtaking dense models only when strong regularization is applied. The study also identifies routing stabilization and expert specialization as key factors in MoE overfitting, and explores regularization techniques that can partially mitigate this issue.
arXiv:2606. 16112v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Residual architectures are ubiquitous in deep learning, but they suffer from a subtle structural limitation: the norm of the residual stream can grow rapidly with depth.
arXiv:2609.27510v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern large language models are pretrained on massive datasets, making it difficult to prevent benchmark data from entering their training sets and...
arXiv:2410.21582v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large-scale pretrained models are widely leveraged as foundations for learning new specialized tasks via fine-tuning, with the goal of mainta...