arXiv:2608. 05499v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern deep neural networks achieve strong performance, but their scale makes them costly and slow, especially on resource-constrained edge devices.
By Sadegh Jafari, Mohiuddin Bilwal, Fan Zhou, Brian Gelder, Ali Jannesari
arXiv:2606. 26002v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present HiReLC, a hierarchical ensemble-reinforcement learning framework for automated joint quantization and structured pruning of deep neural networks.
By Kamar Hibatallah Baghdadi, Kawther Guoual Belhamidi, Sara Belhadj, Aissa Boulmerka, Nadir Farhi
Modern deep neural networks achieve strong performance, but their scale makes them costly and slow, especially on resource-constrained edge devices. Pruning and quantization address this, but rely on manual, expert choices and on algorithms that are hard to apply across architectures.
Deep neural networks have witnessed remarkable advancements in recent years and have become integral to various applications. However, alongside these developments, training and deployment of neural network models on embedding and edge devices face significant challenges due to limited memory and computational resources.
The paper introduces Neural Spectral Capacity (NSC), a closed‑form metric derived from the singular‑value spectrum of weight matrices that can be computed solely from a network’s architectural specification. Unlike traditional measures such as #Params and #FLOPs, NSC captures architectural structure (depth, width, head, FFN allocations) and can be evaluated without instantiating the model, data, or gradients. Using a dynamic‑programming solver (NSC‑DP), the authors demonstrate that NSC can efficiently identify architectures that outperform existing training‑free proxies across Transformer and CNN families, and achieve state‑of‑the‑art results in tasks such as WikiText‑103 and commonsense reasoning with LLaMA‑7B.
whyItMatters":"NSC provides a fast, architecture‑only proxy that outperforms conventional metrics and training‑free proxies, enabling more effective design and pruning of large models without costly training or data."
By Chenyu Zhu, Ruoyu Zhao, Zhichao Lu
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