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 Computation and Language
4d ago

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
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 10

The Sparsity Whisperer

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.

By Linghao Kong, Inimai Subramanian, Micah Adler, Dan Alistarh, Dan Gutfreund, Nir Shavit
arXiv AI
Aug 28

Frequency Matters: Fast Model-Agnostic Data Curation for Pruning and Quantization

The paper introduces ZipCal, a model‑agnostic data curation method that selects calibration data for post‑training compression of large language models by maximizing lexical diversity using Zipfian power laws. ZipCal outperforms uniform random sampling on pruning benchmarks and matches a state‑of‑the‑art perplexity‑based approach while being roughly 240× faster due to its linear complexity. The authors provide code and experiments at their GitHub repository.

By Francesco Pio Monaco, Elia Cunegatti, Flavio Vella, Giovanni Iacca