Adaptive Pruning of Pretrained Transformer via Differential Inclusions

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Ding, Yizhuo, Fan, Ke, Wang, Yikai, Sun, Xinwei, Fu, Yanwei
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Ding, Yizhuo
Fan, Ke
Wang, Yikai
Sun, Xinwei
Fu, Yanwei
author_facet Ding, Yizhuo
Fan, Ke
Wang, Yikai
Sun, Xinwei
Fu, Yanwei
contents Large transformers have demonstrated remarkable success, making it necessary to compress these models to reduce inference costs while preserving their perfor-mance. Current compression algorithms prune transformers at fixed compression ratios, requiring a unique pruning process for each ratio, which results in high computational costs. In contrast, we propose pruning of pretrained transformers at any desired ratio within a single pruning stage, based on a differential inclusion for a mask parameter. This dynamic can generate the whole regularization solution path of the mask parameter, whose support set identifies the network structure. Therefore, the solution path identifies a Transformer weight family with various sparsity levels, offering greater flexibility and customization. In this paper, we introduce such an effective pruning method, termed SPP (Solution Path Pruning). To achieve effective pruning, we segment the transformers into paired modules, including query-key pairs, value-projection pairs, and sequential linear layers, and apply low-rank compression to these pairs, maintaining the output structure while enabling structural compression within the inner states. Extensive experiments conducted on various well-known transformer backbones have demonstrated the efficacy of SPP.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_03289
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Adaptive Pruning of Pretrained Transformer via Differential Inclusions
Ding, Yizhuo
Fan, Ke
Wang, Yikai
Sun, Xinwei
Fu, Yanwei
Machine Learning
Large transformers have demonstrated remarkable success, making it necessary to compress these models to reduce inference costs while preserving their perfor-mance. Current compression algorithms prune transformers at fixed compression ratios, requiring a unique pruning process for each ratio, which results in high computational costs. In contrast, we propose pruning of pretrained transformers at any desired ratio within a single pruning stage, based on a differential inclusion for a mask parameter. This dynamic can generate the whole regularization solution path of the mask parameter, whose support set identifies the network structure. Therefore, the solution path identifies a Transformer weight family with various sparsity levels, offering greater flexibility and customization. In this paper, we introduce such an effective pruning method, termed SPP (Solution Path Pruning). To achieve effective pruning, we segment the transformers into paired modules, including query-key pairs, value-projection pairs, and sequential linear layers, and apply low-rank compression to these pairs, maintaining the output structure while enabling structural compression within the inner states. Extensive experiments conducted on various well-known transformer backbones have demonstrated the efficacy of SPP.
title Adaptive Pruning of Pretrained Transformer via Differential Inclusions
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.03289