STUN: Structured-Then-Unstructured Pruning for Scalable MoE Pruning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Lee, Jaeseong, hwang, seung-won, Qiao, Aurick, Campos, Daniel F, Yao, Zhewei, He, Yuxiong
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Lee, Jaeseong
hwang, seung-won
Qiao, Aurick
Campos, Daniel F
Yao, Zhewei
He, Yuxiong
author_facet Lee, Jaeseong
hwang, seung-won
Qiao, Aurick
Campos, Daniel F
Yao, Zhewei
He, Yuxiong
contents Mixture-of-experts (MoEs) have been adopted for reducing inference costs by sparsely activating experts in Large language models (LLMs). Despite this reduction, the massive number of experts in MoEs still makes them expensive to serve. In this paper, we study how to address this, by pruning MoEs. Among pruning methodologies, unstructured pruning has been known to achieve the highest performance for a given pruning ratio, compared to structured pruning, since the latter imposes constraints on the sparsification structure. This is intuitive, as the solution space of unstructured pruning subsumes that of structured pruning. However, our counterintuitive finding reveals that expert pruning, a form of structured pruning, can actually precede unstructured pruning to outperform unstructured-only pruning. As existing expert pruning, requiring $O(\frac{k^n}{\sqrt{n}})$ forward passes for $n$ experts, cannot scale for recent MoEs, we propose a scalable alternative with $O(1)$ complexity, yet outperforming the more expensive methods. The key idea is leveraging a latent structure between experts, based on behavior similarity, such that the greedy decision of whether to prune closely captures the joint pruning effect. Ours is highly effective -- for Snowflake Arctic, a 480B-sized MoE with 128 experts, our method needs only one H100 and two hours to achieve nearly no loss in performance with 40% sparsity, even in generative tasks such as GSM8K, where state-of-the-art unstructured pruning fails to. The code will be made publicly available.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_06211
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle STUN: Structured-Then-Unstructured Pruning for Scalable MoE Pruning
Lee, Jaeseong
hwang, seung-won
Qiao, Aurick
Campos, Daniel F
Yao, Zhewei
He, Yuxiong
Machine Learning
Computation and Language
Mixture-of-experts (MoEs) have been adopted for reducing inference costs by sparsely activating experts in Large language models (LLMs). Despite this reduction, the massive number of experts in MoEs still makes them expensive to serve. In this paper, we study how to address this, by pruning MoEs. Among pruning methodologies, unstructured pruning has been known to achieve the highest performance for a given pruning ratio, compared to structured pruning, since the latter imposes constraints on the sparsification structure. This is intuitive, as the solution space of unstructured pruning subsumes that of structured pruning. However, our counterintuitive finding reveals that expert pruning, a form of structured pruning, can actually precede unstructured pruning to outperform unstructured-only pruning. As existing expert pruning, requiring $O(\frac{k^n}{\sqrt{n}})$ forward passes for $n$ experts, cannot scale for recent MoEs, we propose a scalable alternative with $O(1)$ complexity, yet outperforming the more expensive methods. The key idea is leveraging a latent structure between experts, based on behavior similarity, such that the greedy decision of whether to prune closely captures the joint pruning effect. Ours is highly effective -- for Snowflake Arctic, a 480B-sized MoE with 128 experts, our method needs only one H100 and two hours to achieve nearly no loss in performance with 40% sparsity, even in generative tasks such as GSM8K, where state-of-the-art unstructured pruning fails to. The code will be made publicly available.
title STUN: Structured-Then-Unstructured Pruning for Scalable MoE Pruning
topic Machine Learning
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.06211