arXiv AI By Athanasios Ntovas, Alexandros Doumanoglou, Petros Drakoulis, Dimitris Zarpalas

Compressing What Matters: Neuron Importance Meets Data-Aware Low Rank Approximation for Language Model Compression

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arXiv:2607. 18284v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: To excel at their domain large language models are comprised of billions of parameters.

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arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

LILA: Calibration-Free Structured Pruning of Large Language Models via Latent Spectral Geometry

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