Beware of Calibration Data for Pruning Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ji, Yixin, Xiang, Yang, Li, Juntao, Xia, Qingrong, Li, Ping, Duan, Xinyu, Wang, Zhefeng, Zhang, Min
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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_version_ 1866908425909174272
author Ji, Yixin
Xiang, Yang
Li, Juntao
Xia, Qingrong
Li, Ping
Duan, Xinyu
Wang, Zhefeng
Zhang, Min
author_facet Ji, Yixin
Xiang, Yang
Li, Juntao
Xia, Qingrong
Li, Ping
Duan, Xinyu
Wang, Zhefeng
Zhang, Min
contents As large language models (LLMs) are widely applied across various fields, model compression has become increasingly crucial for reducing costs and improving inference efficiency. Post-training pruning is a promising method that does not require resource-intensive iterative training and only needs a small amount of calibration data to assess the importance of parameters. Recent research has enhanced post-training pruning from different aspects but few of them systematically explore the effects of calibration data, and it is unclear if there exist better calibration data construction strategies. We fill this blank and surprisingly observe that calibration data is also crucial to post-training pruning, especially for high sparsity. Through controlled experiments on important influence factors of calibration data, including the pruning settings, the amount of data, and its similarity with pre-training data, we observe that a small size of data is adequate, and more similar data to its pre-training stage can yield better performance. As pre-training data is usually inaccessible for advanced LLMs, we further provide a self-generating calibration data synthesis strategy to construct feasible calibration data. Experimental results on recent strong open-source LLMs (e.g., DCLM, and LLaMA-3) show that the proposed strategy can enhance the performance of strong pruning methods (e.g., Wanda, DSnoT, OWL) by a large margin (up to $2.68\%$). Code is available at https://github.com/Dereck0602/calibration_data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_17711
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Beware of Calibration Data for Pruning Large Language Models
Ji, Yixin
Xiang, Yang
Li, Juntao
Xia, Qingrong
Li, Ping
Duan, Xinyu
Wang, Zhefeng
Zhang, Min
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
As large language models (LLMs) are widely applied across various fields, model compression has become increasingly crucial for reducing costs and improving inference efficiency. Post-training pruning is a promising method that does not require resource-intensive iterative training and only needs a small amount of calibration data to assess the importance of parameters. Recent research has enhanced post-training pruning from different aspects but few of them systematically explore the effects of calibration data, and it is unclear if there exist better calibration data construction strategies. We fill this blank and surprisingly observe that calibration data is also crucial to post-training pruning, especially for high sparsity. Through controlled experiments on important influence factors of calibration data, including the pruning settings, the amount of data, and its similarity with pre-training data, we observe that a small size of data is adequate, and more similar data to its pre-training stage can yield better performance. As pre-training data is usually inaccessible for advanced LLMs, we further provide a self-generating calibration data synthesis strategy to construct feasible calibration data. Experimental results on recent strong open-source LLMs (e.g., DCLM, and LLaMA-3) show that the proposed strategy can enhance the performance of strong pruning methods (e.g., Wanda, DSnoT, OWL) by a large margin (up to $2.68\%$). Code is available at https://github.com/Dereck0602/calibration_data.
title Beware of Calibration Data for Pruning Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.17711