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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.
arXiv:2508. 13836v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Pruning is a core technique for compressing neural networks to improve computational efficiency.
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.
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.
arXiv:2311.04902v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) with billions of parameters are prime targets for network pruning, which removes some model weights without hurt...
arXiv:2604.13287v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Weight pruning is a common technique for compressing large neural networks. We focus on the challenging post-training one-shot setting, where a pre...