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.
LILA (Latent-Informed Layer Analysis) introduces a calibration‑free method for structured pruning of large language models by scoring neuron importance using the Kolmogorov–Smirnov distance between singular value distributions of full and neuron‑ablated feed‑forward network weight matrices. The approach requires no training, calibration data, or auxiliary networks, and outperforms existing methods such as PruneNet and SliceGPT on LLaMA‑2‑7B and Phi‑2 at various sparsity levels. After a single epoch of LoRA fine‑tuning, LILA matches heavily calibrated baselines, and a Neural Tangent Kernel analysis provides theoretical support for its spectral importance criterion. Additionally, LILA can dynamically allocate sparsity budgets, achieving state‑of‑the‑art generative preservation and revealing architectural bottlenecks at higher compression.
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:2610.15514v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Structured pruning reduces the inference cost of large language models (LLMs) by permanently removing neurons and weight rows, yielding dense, hardwa...
arXiv:2509. 14230v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While structured pruning presents a highly effective pathway for accelerating Large Language Model (LLM) inference, existing methods frequently suffer from significant performance degradation and demand computationally retraining to recover capabilities.
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: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...
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.
arXiv:2606. 09885v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts large language models (LLMs) scale efficiently through sparse activation, yet their deployment is fundamentally constrained by the large static parameter footprint of experts.
Task-Aware Spectral Pruning (TASP) is a post‑training framework that tailors sparse masks to specific tasks by calibrating module‑level spectral descriptors against task‑specific ablation effects. It constructs masks that close grouped‑query‑attention and SwiGLU dependencies, routing each user turn to a single compiled mask that remains fixed during prefill and decoding. In experiments, TASP achieves a 43% active‑FLOP reduction while preserving 97.7% of the dense BF16 performance on Llama‑3‑70B, and delivers a 1.44× speedup on an A100 80GB with INT8‑weight/BF16‑compute, reducing decode latency from 45.2 to 31.3 ms/token.
SparseDecoding is a decoding‑aware pruning framework that improves large language model inference by aligning pruning with the activations seen during actual autoregressive generation. It constructs calibration matrices from dense‑model activations (excluding prefill) and introduces an optimized N:M sparse matrix‑vector kernel with bitmask indexing to accelerate decoding. Experiments on models such as Llama‑3.1‑8B, Llama‑3.3‑70B, and Qwen3‑14B/32B show consistent performance gains over standard fixed‑text calibration and up to 1.48× wall‑clock speedup on A100 GPUs.
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:2607. 15525v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Kolmogorov--Arnold Networks (KANs) replace fixed node activations with learned one-dimensional edge functions, offering an explicit interface for interpretation and a possible alternative to transformer feed-forward networks.
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.