arXiv Machine Learning

Your Transformer Is Secretly Elastic

The paper presents a retraining‑free technique that transforms pre‑trained transformers into elastic models capable of adapting to any computational budget on the fly. By jointly ranking every MLP neuron and attention head on a common scale and applying soft pruning across multiple sparsity targets, the method achieves smooth performance degradation up to 60% sparsity while outperforming one‑shot baselines. Experiments on 27 vision and text transformer encoders show significant parameter reductions with minimal accuracy loss and notable throughput and latency gains on GPUs, all produced in minutes.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 23

Magnitude Profile Pruning: Calibration-Free Structured Attention Head Removal for Transformer Compression

Magnitude Profile Pruning introduces a training‑free, calibration‑free method for removing attention heads in Transformer models by statistically detecting outliers in weight row norms. Heads whose projection weights fall within the bulk of the distribution are pruned, while outlier heads are retained. Across several models, the MP‑G variant achieves superior perplexity at various sparsity levels and yields significant parameter and FLOP reductions without requiring forward passes, calibration data, or gradient computations.

By Kasun Dewage, Marianna Pensky, Heranga K. Rathnasekara, Suranadi De Silva
arXiv AI
Aug 11

Full-bandwidth transformer

arXiv:2608. 08888v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autoregressive transformers compute along two axes: horizontally across generated tokens, and vertically through model depth.

By Xi Wang, Ziyang Cai, Zheng Zhan, Harry Dong, Ying Fan, Gustavo de Rosa, Tim Pearce, John Langford
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 11

Gradient Under Microscope: Benchmarking Resource Utilization of Memory-Efficient Gradient Computation Methods

arXiv:2608. 08961v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI training's rising resource intensity is straining electricity supplies and carbon budgets, motivating systematic study of memory-efficient training on constrained hardware.

By Sarthak Mahapatra, Zihan Zhou, Khatoon Khedri, Mehdi Hosseinzadeh, Reza Rawassizadeh