The paper introduces Weight-Redundancy Pruning (WRP), a forward‑free depth‑pruning technique for large language models that estimates inter‑layer redundancy using only checkpoint weights. WRP compares attention outputs and MLP down‑projection weights across layers, combining pairwise similarities with relative projection‑scale information to guide layer grouping and block selection. Experiments show that WRP consistently outperforms existing forward‑free magnitude pruning methods and approaches the performance of activation‑based pruning across various pruning settings, model families, and downstream tasks.
By Vincent-Daniel Yun, Woosang Lim
arXiv:2607. 21291v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong generation and reasoning performance, but the Transformer architecture incurs high inference cost.
By Yidu Wu, Xiang Wang, Kejie Zhao, Zhangchi Wang, Qinghai Guo, Xiaoying Tang
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
arXiv:2606. 08156v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision Transformers (ViTs) achieve strong performance but suffer from high computational costs due to quadratic self-attention complexity.
By Kyumin Choi, Ikbeom Jang
SHIFT-LLM is a training‑free post‑pruning correction framework that inserts a Linear Residual Adapter (LRA) at each depth‑pruned site in large language models. Each LRA preserves the original residual identity while adding a lightweight affine correction calibrated via closed‑form least‑squares regression on a small held‑out set, thereby approximating the hidden state that would have been produced by the removed block. Experiments across multiple model families and benchmarks show that SHIFT‑LLM consistently recovers accuracy lost to depth pruning, achieving gains up to +15.7 points on Llama‑3.1‑8B‑Instruct with only a few hundred calibration samples and no gradient computation.
By Ali Bahri, Hang Li, Hongliang Li, Zhitang Chen
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:2605. 15491v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Layer pruning removes entire Transformer decoder blocks from large language models, but introduces a mismatch between the hidden state received by the next surviving layer and the distribution it was trained to process, leading to significant performance degradation.
By Vincent-Daniel Yun, Junhyuk Jo, Sai Praneeth Karimireddy, Sunwoo Lee
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
FastE is a training‑free, plug‑and‑play method that compresses token prefixes in large language model (LLM) embedding inference. It uses a shared fixed threshold on batch‑mean readout‑prefix alignment to decide when to compress and ranks prefix states by readout attention scores to keep the most important ones. Experiments on Qwen3‑Embedding models show that FastE can cut decoder‑backbone FLOPs by over 40% while preserving more than 99% of the original ranking quality across multiple benchmarks and tasks.
By Jinsong Shu, Jinyong Wen, Baokun Wang, Zhongle Xie, Lidan Shou, Weiqiang Wang, Gang Chen
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:2603. 00198v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Token reduction accelerates long-video vision--language models (VLMs), but existing methods target Transformers, where reduction is treated as token pruning.
By Jindong Jiang, Amala Sanjay Deshmukh, Kateryna Chumachenko, Karan Sapra, Zhiding Yu, Guilin Liu, Andrew Tao, Pavlo Molchanov, Jan Kautz, Wonmin Byeon
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