Semi-structured 2:4 sparsity is widely supported by modern accelerators, providing up to a 2x theoretical speedup. However, its strict 50% sparsity constraint often causes non-negligible accuracy degradation under post-training pruning.
arXiv:2607. 08786v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: With the growing deployment of large language models (LLMs), LLM inference cost has become a key challenge.
By Tao Lu, Haoyu Wang, Zonghui Wang, Keshen Xiang, Jiaheng Zhang, Wenzhi Chen
arXiv:2607. 21985v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The increasing deployment of large language models (LLMs) has magnified the computational and memory bottlenecks of autoregressive decoding, where low compute intensity and bandwidth-bound kernels dominate inference cost.
By Jinhyeok Kim, Yejoon Lee, Jaeyoung Do
Celty introduces a co-designed sparse format, GPU kernel, and SIMT microarchitecture to efficiently handle Sparse Matrix‑Sparse Vector (SpMSpV) workloads in large language model inference. Its Run‑Length Compressed CSC (RLC‑CSC) format allows vectorized loading of compressed weight columns and skips memory accesses by exploiting both weight pruning and activation sparsity. The Celty Sparse SIMT Core adds a pipelined RLC decoder that eliminates software index reconstruction and uses local registers for conflict‑free accumulation, achieving up to 5.3× speedup over cuBLAS at 70% dual‑sparsity.
By Ruokai Yin, Priyadarshini Panda
arXiv:2608. 01536v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly rely on sparsity to reduce inference cost, but most prior work targets a single sparsity source-either weight or activation-and optimizes for batched multi-user inference.
By Ruokai Yin, Priyadarshini Panda
arXiv:2607. 28418v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pruning is a promising approach for improving the efficiency of LLMs.
By Haozhe Hu, Hao Wu, Peiran Yin, Chao Han, Yunpu Ma, Xiaoyu Shen
arXiv:2606. 09080v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pruning has emerged as a dominant paradigm for accelerating large language model (LLM) inference, spanning a broad spectrum of methods that remove computation across tokens, layers, heads, dimensions, and attention patterns.
By Haozhe Hu, Hao Wu, Anhao Zhao, Longwei Ding, Peiran Yin, Yunpu Ma, Xiaoyu Shen
arXiv:2607. 25504v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fine-grained weight pruning and activation sparsification have emerged as effective approaches for reducing the compute and memory cost of inference for Transformer models.
By Bowen Wang, Chi Zhang, Diyou Shen, Renzo Andri, Navaneeth Kunhi Purayil, Luca Benini
The paper introduces the "Compression Trinity," a unified framework that jointly applies sparsity, quantization, and low‑rank approximations to compress large language models. It presents several methods—MKOR, SLoPe, OPTIMA, PATCH, and SLiM—that leverage these three pillars to accelerate training, reduce memory bandwidth, and recover accuracy, achieving significant speedups and accuracy gains over existing techniques. The results demonstrate that combining all three compression strategies is essential for efficient, scalable, high‑performance LLM deployment.
By Mohammad Mozaffari
Prohibitive computational and environmental costs impede the scalable deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs). Traditional compression techniques (sparsity, quantization, low-rank approximations) a...
arXiv:2510. 14812v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Structured weight sparsity accelerates training and inference on modern GPUs, but it trails unstructured dynamic sparse training (DST) in accuracy especially at extreme sparsity.
By Abhishek Tyagi, Arjun Iyer, Liam Young, William H Renninger, Christopher Kanan, Yuhao Zhu
arXiv:2606. 26587v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Low-bit floating-point formats and semi-structured sparsity are increasingly supported by modern accelerators, yet combining them for LLM activation compression remains challenging: activations contain input-dependent outliers that dominate block scales in FP4 quantization, and directly applying N:M sparsity masks discards moderate values, coupling sparsification loss with quantization error.
By Haoqian Meng, Yilun Luo, Yafei Zhao, Wenyuan Liu, Huaqing Zheng, Xindian Ma, Peng Zhang