arXiv:2606. 12278v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural network pruning reduces model size by removing less important parameters while aiming to preserve predictive performance.
By Romana Qureshi, Hafida Benhidour, Said Kerrache, Nahlah Aljeraisy
Neural network pruning reduces model size by removing less important parameters while aiming to preserve predictive performance. Although the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH) shows that sparse subnetworks can match dense networks when trained from suitable initializations, its iterative pruning procedure requires multiple complete training cycles.
arXiv:2609.37899v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Zero-order optimization (ZO) trains without backpropagation, making it relevant to forward-only hardware and non-differentiable loss, but its gradient...
By Francois Chaubard, Mykel J. Kochenderfer, Chris R\'e
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.
By Sankar Behera, Dhruv Singh, Anshika Agnihotri, Raj Kumar Choudhary, Satyadev Ahlawat, Yamuna Prasad
arXiv:2609.30465v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Mixture-of-experts (MoE) models activate few experts per token but store the full expert pool. Expert pruning reduces this storage burden; at a fixed...
By Mingyang Song, Mao Zheng
Spectral-Guided Diffusion introduces a method to accelerate diffusion inference by identifying and reusing residual branches that need not be recomputed during the trajectory. The approach uses a Spectral Concentration Ratio (SCR) combined with Frobenius magnitude to create an offline sensitivity proxy and deterministic lifetime for each scheduled unit, eliminating the need for routers or input-dependent searches. Experiments on models such as LLaDA-8B, DiT-XL/2, U-ViT-L, and SDXL show that this scheduling preserves quality better than several baselines and achieves up to a 3.0× wall‑clock speedup over eager inference.
By Ibne Farabi Shihab, Abu Sa-Adat Mohamed Moon-Im Al Ahsan, Anuj Sharma
The paper introduces Sparsity-Adaptive Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SA‑SAM), a method that adjusts the perturbation radius in sharpness-aware training to remain consistent as model sparsity increases. It also evaluates a Magnitude‑Weighted Hessian (MWH) importance metric derived from second‑order analysis. Experiments on CIFAR‑10‑C, CIFAR‑100‑C, and ImageNet‑100‑C show that SA‑SAM improves corruption robustness at 80–90% sparsity while maintaining clean accuracy, and the study reports inference throughput at deployment‑relevant sparsity levels.
By Shiryu Ueno, Yoshikazu Hayashi, Kunihito Kato
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.
By Ibne Farabi Shihab, Fariya Afrin, Sanjeda Akter, Anuj Sharma
arXiv:2608. 05499v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern deep neural networks achieve strong performance, but their scale makes them costly and slow, especially on resource-constrained edge devices.
By Sadegh Jafari, Mohiuddin Bilwal, Fan Zhou, Brian Gelder, Ali Jannesari
arXiv:2606. 27866v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models scale model ability with sparsely activated experts, making this architecture a standard recipe for modern large models.
By Fan Mo, Yuxuan Han, Geng Zhang, Wangbo Zhao, Yang You
arXiv:2608.23744v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Split conformal prediction, not the pruning rule, supplies finite-sample marginal coverage once a pruned model is fixed independently of the conformal...
By Ibne Farabi Shihab, Adria Binte Habib, Anuj Sharma
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.
By Felippe Alves, Renato Vicente