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: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: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.
By Xiaoyun Liu, Divya Saxena, Jiannong Cao, Yuqing Zhao, Yiying Dong, Penghui Ruan
arXiv:2510. 00192v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) has become a widely used paradigm for parameter-efficient fine-tuning of large language models, yet its representational capacity often lags behind full fine-tuning.
By Xin Yu, Cong Xie, Xunmei Liu, Tiantian Fan, Lingzhou Xue, Zhi Zhang
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
The paper introduces ZipCal, a model‑agnostic data curation method that selects calibration data for post‑training compression of large language models by maximizing lexical diversity using Zipfian power laws. ZipCal outperforms uniform random sampling on pruning benchmarks and matches a state‑of‑the‑art perplexity‑based approach while being roughly 240× faster due to its linear complexity. The authors provide code and experiments at their GitHub repository.
By Francesco Pio Monaco, Elia Cunegatti, Flavio Vella, Giovanni Iacca
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.
By Mengting Ai, Tianxin Wei, Sirui Chen, Jingrui He
arXiv:2507. 01900v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Pruning is a highly effective approach for compressing large language models (LLMs), significantly reducing inference latency.
By Songtao Liu, Peng Liu
arXiv:2602. 01997v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent work has shown that layer pruning can effectively compress large language models (LLMs) while retaining strong performance on classification benchmarks, often with little or no finetuning.
By Safal Shrestha, Anubhav Shrestha, Minwu Kim, Aadim Nepal, Keith Ross
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.
By Minseok Kang, Hyunwoo Kim, Chanyoung Kim, Minwoo Kim, Jaekoo Lee, Dahuin Jung
The paper introduces Dual-Seed Comparison (DSC), a protocol that uses two independent LLM-generated seeds to reduce systematic bias in probabilistic sampling. DSC constructs a bit sequence from the character-level ordinal values of the seeds, normalizes it into a pseudo-uniform variate, and maps it to the target distribution via the inverse cumulative distribution function. Empirical results show DSC outperforms existing methods in 96% of evaluated settings and enhances distributional control in tasks like MCQ generation and attribute-constrained text-to-image prompting.
By Zihao Guo, Hongtao Lv, Chaoli Zhang, Laiguo Yin, Lei Liu, Yonghui Xu, Lizhen Cui
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