arXiv AI

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.

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
Sep 17

OBC-Prune: Outcome-Based Calibration for Large Reasoning Model Pruning

OBC‑Prune introduces an outcome‑based calibration approach for pruning large reasoning models, focusing on the causal importance of each reasoning sentence rather than uniform activation salience. By pairing correct and incorrect rollouts and using intervention‑based analysis, it assigns per‑token weights that guide one‑shot pruning methods such as SparseGPT, Wanda, and ALPS. Experiments on DeepSeek‑R1‑Distill‑Qwen models show consistent accuracy gains and shorter reasoning traces across multiple benchmarks at 40‑50% sparsity.

By Ha Lan Nguyen, Huy Hoang Tran, Trac-Duy Tran, Dung D. Le
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 9

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.

By Haozhe Hu, Hao Wu, Anhao Zhao, Longwei Ding, Peiran Yin, Yunpu Ma, Xiaoyu Shen
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 28

Compressing LLMs with MoP: Mixture of Pruners

arXiv:2602. 06127v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The high computational demands of Large Language Models (LLMs) motivate methods that reduce parameter count and accelerate inference.

By Bruno Lopes Yamamoto, Lucas Lauton de Alcantara, Victor Zacarias, Leandro Giusti Mugnaini, Keith Ando Ogawa, Lucas Pellicer, Rosimeire Pereira Costa, Edson Bollis, Anna Helena Reali Costa, Artur Jordao
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 5

Capability Scaling-Down Laws for LLM Compression

The paper presents a systematic study of how different compression techniques—pruning, quantization, and distillation—affect the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in tasks such as mathematics, code generation, and question answering. It introduces a framework that measures capability loss and relates it to factors like model size, training stage, and compression settings, yielding simple predictive relations that generalize across unseen configurations. The authors demonstrate that sharing density responses across pruning levels can dramatically reduce the number of measurements needed, and that their predictive models closely match regression results while offering efficient decision guidance for compression method selection.

By Xueqi Cheng, Liang Wu, Kelly Wan, Liangjie Hong, Yushun Dong