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:2607. 18280v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are often compressed through static parameter pruning or dynamic token-level computation, yet aggressive sparsification can trigger rapid performance degradation beyond an essential sparsity boundary.
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: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:2605. 18331v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have experienced significant growth and development in recent years.
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:2507. 01900v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Pruning is a highly effective approach for compressing large language models (LLMs), significantly reducing inference latency.
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: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:2606. 18383v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are increasingly used to extract interpretable features from language models (LMs), yet a central question remains: when can an SAE-based explanation be treated as a faithful view of an underlying frozen LM We study this through a post-hoc generalization framework that certifies the LM via a sparse proxy, obtained by replacing a native hidden activation with its pretrained SAE reconstruction.
arXiv:2609.02496v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model compression techniques such as pruning and quantization facilitate the efficient deployment and acceleration of Large Language Models (LLMs). How...
arXiv:2508. 17320v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Understanding the internal representations of large language models (LLMs) remains a central challenge for interpretability research.
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.