arXiv AI

SKIM: Pruning Large Language Model Agents via Selective Knowledge Informed Masking

SKIM (Selective Knowledge-Informed Masking) is a pruning and distillation framework designed for large language model agents that operate under structured generation, where grammar constraints limit output to valid tokens. The method partitions token positions into context, decision, and format categories, using category-aware pruning to preserve parameters most relevant to decision positions and an on-policy distillation objective that aligns student and teacher on valid tokens with category-aware feature matching. Evaluations on tool-calling benchmarks and multi-step agent loops across various model scales and sparsity levels show that SKIM consistently outperforms baseline compression methods, especially in high-sparsity regimes where conventional techniques falter.

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 Computation and Language
Oct 23

Beyond Prompt and Parser Engineering: Soft-Prompt Tuning for Automated LLM Evaluation

The paper introduces soft‑prompt tuning as a lightweight, automated method for evaluating large language models (LLMs). By optimizing only ten soft‑prompt vectors—about 0.0006% of a 7B model’s parameters—within 150 steps, the approach adapts models to specific benchmark formats, improving format compliance while preserving knowledge accuracy. Experiments across seven models and eleven datasets show that this method matches strong evaluation‑harness baselines, enhances evaluation signals on challenging datasets, and yields cleaner outputs that align better with exact‑match scoring and independent LLM judges.

By Selen Erkan, Bastian Boll, Kristian Kersting, Bj\"orn Deiseroth, Letitia Parcalabescu
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 14

Unifying Depth and Width Pruning for LLMs via Binary Knapsack Optimization

arXiv:2608. 12953v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Structured pruning is a promising approach for compressing large language models (LLMs), yet existing methods rely heavily on greedy heuristics that produce myopic decisions, and often fail to precisely meet target compression budgets.

By Palaash Goel, Ayan Sengupta, Akshay Nambi, Tanmoy Chakraborty
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Oct 22

Harnessing Language Models as Optimization Modeling Agents

The paper introduces two lightweight inference harnesses, OPTICYCLE and OPTISTATE, designed to enable large language models to translate natural-language optimization problems into solver programs without additional training. Evaluated across nine benchmarks and 11 Qwen variants (0.6B–27B parameters), the harnesses consistently improve macro accuracy, with execution-guided revision boosting performance by up to 49.46 percentage points. Despite their simplicity, both harnesses outperform six adapted agentic workflows and four post-trained optimization models of comparable size, though the benefit of explicit formulation state varies by model.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 13

Unifying Depth and Width Pruning for LLMs via Binary Knapsack Optimization

Structured pruning is a promising approach for compressing large language models (LLMs), yet existing methods rely heavily on greedy heuristics that produce myopic decisions, and often fail to precisely meet target compression budgets. We present SNIPER, a two-stage structured pruning framework that solves a knapsack optimization over coarse-granularity components to yield conditionally optimal parameter allocations with respect to fixed importance estimates, followed by a fine-grained pruning stage to meet strict budget constraints.

arXiv AI
Sep 3

OptSkills: Learning Generalizable Optimization Skills from Problem Archetypes via Cluster-Based Distillation

OptSkills is an archetype‑centric agent that learns and reasons about optimization problems using large language models. It clusters problems by underlying archetypes, explores diverse modeling and solver configurations within each cluster, and distills successful trajectories into reusable workflow‑level skills. The system achieves state‑of‑the‑art accuracy on multiple datasets, outperforming prior methods on challenging benchmarks such as MIPLIB‑NL and OOD NLCO.

By Haochen Yang, Ke Zhao, Mengyuan Ma, Xingyu Lu, Xiangfeng Wang, Hong Qian