arXiv AI
Sep 15

LayerRoute: Adaptive Layer-Skipping with LoRA-Preserved Quality for Efficient LLM Inference

LayerRoute is a parameter‑efficient technique that enables adaptive skipping of transformer layers in large language models. It adds a lightweight per‑layer router (~21.5K parameters) and LoRA adapters (rank 8, ~1.08M parameters) to each of the 24 blocks in Qwen2.5‑0.5B‑Instruct, training them jointly with a gate‑regularized language‑modeling objective. Across ten independent runs, the method consistently identifies nine middle layers as skip‑eligible, achieves a verified wall‑clock speedup of 1.02x–1.06x, and improves perplexity by an average of 1.16 points, while the router’s decisions vary per input, confirming genuine adaptive behavior.

By Prateek Kumar Sikdar
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 15

Your Transformer Is Secretly Elastic

The paper presents a retraining‑free technique that transforms pre‑trained transformers into elastic models capable of adapting to any computational budget on the fly. By jointly ranking every MLP neuron and attention head on a common scale and applying soft pruning across multiple sparsity targets, the method achieves smooth performance degradation up to 60% sparsity while outperforming one‑shot baselines. Experiments on 27 vision and text transformer encoders show significant parameter reductions with minimal accuracy loss and notable throughput and latency gains on GPUs, all produced in minutes.

By Walter Simoncini, Dheeraj Varghese, Gertjan J. Burghouts, Cees G. M. Snoek