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...
By Hyeondo Jang, Kwanhee Lee, Dongyeop Lee, Namhoon Lee
arXiv:2605. 18331v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have experienced significant growth and development in recent years.
By Diego Coello de Portugal Mecke, Tom Hanika, Lars Schmidth-Thieme
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: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:2311.04902v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) with billions of parameters are prime targets for network pruning, which removes some model weights without hurt...
By Rocktim Jyoti Das, Mukul Ranjan, Mingjie Sun, Liqun Ma, Zhiqiang Shen
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.
By Suchit Gupte, Xueru Zhang, Mohammad Mahdi Khalili
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.
By Nicol\'as Mauricio Cuadrado \'Avila, Ivo Gollini Navarrete, Martin Tak\'a\v{c}, Samuel Horv\'ath
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.
By Chao Han, Haozhe Hu, Xiaoyu Shen
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: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.
By Linghao Kong, Inimai Subramanian, Micah Adler, Dan Alistarh, Dan Gutfreund, Nir Shavit
arXiv:2606. 25285v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-Training Sparsity (PTS) has emerged as a crucial paradigm for compressing Large Language Models to facilitate efficient deployment on resource-constrained devices.
By Ke Xu, Jiaqi Wan, Wenhao Hu, Han Pu, Xiaoyun Wang
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.
By Boqian Wu, Qiao Xiao, Patrik Okanovic, Tomasz Sternal, Maurice van Keulen, Mykola Pechenizkiy, Elena Mocanu, Torsten Hoefler, Decebal Constantin Mocanu