arXiv Machine Learning

Beyond FLOPs: Benchmarking Real Inference Acceleration of LLM Pruning under a GEMM-Centric Taxonomy

arXiv:2606. 09080v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pruning has emerged as a dominant paradigm for accelerating large language model (LLM) inference, spanning a broad spectrum of methods that remove computation across tokens, layers, heads, dimensions, and attention patterns.

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Pruning Laws for Large Language Models

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...

By Ayan Sengupta, Siddhant Chaudhary, Tanmoy Chakraborty
arXiv AI
Aug 25

Revisiting the Effectiveness of LLM Pruning for Test-Time Scaling

The paper revisits the impact of pruning on large language models (LLMs) during test-time scaling (TTS). While prior work found that structured pruning degrades reasoning performance, this study shows that unstructured pruning—removing only specific redundant weights—can actually improve TTS performance on reasoning benchmarks for models s1.1-7B and Qwen3-8B, sometimes surpassing the full-weight models. The authors also examine how different layer-wise sparsity allocation strategies affect these outcomes.

By Ocean Monjur, Shahriar Kabir Nahin, Anshuman Chhabra
arXiv AI
Jul 21

Sparsity-Aware Low-Rank Representation for Efficient Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models

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.

By Longteng Zhang, Sen Wu, Shuai Hou, Zhengyu Qing, Zhuo Zheng, Danning Ke, Qihong Lin, Qiang Wang, Shaohuai Shi, Xiaowen Chu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 23

Accelerating the Mitigation of LLM Inference Nondeterminism Across GPU Architectures

The paper addresses the problem of non‑deterministic outputs from large language models (LLMs) when run on different GPU architectures, caused by floating‑point non‑associativity and hardware‑dependent kernel choices. It proposes a set of fixed‑configuration fused‑upcast GEMM kernels that load 16‑bit weights, upcast to FP32, and perform IEEE‑754 compliant reductions in a problem‑shape‑dependent order, ensuring identical linear‑layer outputs across NVIDIA Ampere, Ada, and Hopper GPUs. The new approach achieves 1.17–3.1× faster end‑to‑end performance than existing solutions and halves weight‑memory traffic while maintaining cross‑architecture reproducibility.

By Liam Cooper, Shinnung Jeong, Hyeran Jeon, Jeffrey Young, Hyesoon Kim
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 25

Task-Aware Spectral Pruning: A Mixture-of-Masks Framework for Efficient LLM Inference

Task-Aware Spectral Pruning (TASP) is a post‑training framework that tailors sparse masks to specific tasks by calibrating module‑level spectral descriptors against task‑specific ablation effects. It constructs masks that close grouped‑query‑attention and SwiGLU dependencies, routing each user turn to a single compiled mask that remains fixed during prefill and decoding. In experiments, TASP achieves a 43% active‑FLOP reduction while preserving 97.7% of the dense BF16 performance on Llama‑3‑70B, and delivers a 1.44× speedup on an A100 80GB with INT8‑weight/BF16‑compute, reducing decode latency from 45.2 to 31.3 ms/token.

By Ibne Farabi Shihab, Fariya Afrin, Sanjeda Akter, Anuj Sharma