arXiv AI By Vincent-Daniel Yun, Woosang Lim

Forward-Free LLM Depth Pruning via Weight Redundancy

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The paper introduces Weight-Redundancy Pruning (WRP), a forward‑free depth‑pruning technique for large language models that estimates inter‑layer redundancy using only checkpoint weights. WRP compares attention outputs and MLP down‑projection weights across layers, combining pairwise similarities with relative projection‑scale information to guide layer grouping and block selection. Experiments show that WRP consistently outperforms existing forward‑free magnitude pruning methods and approaches the performance of activation‑based pruning across various pruning settings, model families, and downstream tasks.

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