arXiv AI

Prune Gradually, Adapt Sparsely: Efficient Pruning of Large Language Models at Extreme Sparsity

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
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
Aug 27

When Pruning Meets Interpretability: Preserving Sparse Autoencoder Robustness in LLMs

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
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 22

Building a Nested LADDER for LLM Unstructured Post-Training Pruning

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 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 Machine Learning
Aug 10

The Sparsity Whisperer

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