arXiv AI

Sparsity-Aware Low-Rank Representation for Efficient Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models

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.

arXiv AI
Aug 26

Compression Trinity: Exploring Sparsity, Quantization, and Low-Rank Approximations for LLM Compression

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
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

When Pruning Meets Interpretability: Preserving Sparse Autoencoder Robustness in LLMs

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 Machine Learning
Aug 27

Resource-Efficient Pruning for Transformer via Low-Rank Importance Estimation

The paper introduces REP‑LIE, a resource‑efficient pruning method for Transformer models that estimates weight importance using gradients from LoRA low‑rank matrices, avoiding full gradient computation. It incorporates a stability score to iteratively prune unimportant parameters and then fine‑tunes the pruned model with lightweight updates, eliminating the need for full‑parameter optimization. Experiments on medium‑scale encoders and large‑scale generative models such as LLaMA‑7B and Mistral‑7B show that REP‑LIE achieves competitive performance compared to existing pruning approaches.

By Peng Liu, Huibing Zeng, Yiqun Zhang, Yang Yi, Jigang Wu
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Pruning Laws for Large Language Models

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