FASP: Fast and Accurate Structured Pruning of Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Hu, Hanyu, Zhao, Pengxiang, Li, Ping, Zheng, Yi, Wang, Zhefeng, Yuan, Xiaoming
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Hu, Hanyu
Zhao, Pengxiang
Li, Ping
Zheng, Yi
Wang, Zhefeng
Yuan, Xiaoming
author_facet Hu, Hanyu
Zhao, Pengxiang
Li, Ping
Zheng, Yi
Wang, Zhefeng
Yuan, Xiaoming
contents The rapid increase in the size of large language models (LLMs) has significantly escalated their computational and memory demands, posing challenges for efficient deployment, especially on resource-constrained devices. Structured pruning has emerged as an effective model compression method that can reduce these demands while preserving performance. In this paper, we introduce FASP (Fast and Accurate Structured Pruning), a novel structured pruning framework for LLMs that emphasizes both speed and accuracy. FASP employs a distinctive pruning structure that interlinks sequential layers, allowing for the removal of columns in one layer while simultaneously eliminating corresponding rows in the preceding layer without incurring additional performance loss. The pruning metric, inspired by Wanda, is computationally efficient and effectively selects components to prune. Additionally, we propose a restoration mechanism that enhances model fidelity by adjusting the remaining weights post-pruning. We evaluate FASP on the OPT and LLaMA model families, demonstrating superior performance in terms of perplexity and accuracy on downstream tasks compared to state-of-the-art methods. Our approach achieves significant speed-ups, pruning models such as OPT-125M in 17 seconds and LLaMA-30B in 15 minutes on a single NVIDIA RTX 4090 GPU, making it a highly practical solution for optimizing LLMs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_09412
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FASP: Fast and Accurate Structured Pruning of Large Language Models
Hu, Hanyu
Zhao, Pengxiang
Li, Ping
Zheng, Yi
Wang, Zhefeng
Yuan, Xiaoming
Machine Learning
The rapid increase in the size of large language models (LLMs) has significantly escalated their computational and memory demands, posing challenges for efficient deployment, especially on resource-constrained devices. Structured pruning has emerged as an effective model compression method that can reduce these demands while preserving performance. In this paper, we introduce FASP (Fast and Accurate Structured Pruning), a novel structured pruning framework for LLMs that emphasizes both speed and accuracy. FASP employs a distinctive pruning structure that interlinks sequential layers, allowing for the removal of columns in one layer while simultaneously eliminating corresponding rows in the preceding layer without incurring additional performance loss. The pruning metric, inspired by Wanda, is computationally efficient and effectively selects components to prune. Additionally, we propose a restoration mechanism that enhances model fidelity by adjusting the remaining weights post-pruning. We evaluate FASP on the OPT and LLaMA model families, demonstrating superior performance in terms of perplexity and accuracy on downstream tasks compared to state-of-the-art methods. Our approach achieves significant speed-ups, pruning models such as OPT-125M in 17 seconds and LLaMA-30B in 15 minutes on a single NVIDIA RTX 4090 GPU, making it a highly practical solution for optimizing LLMs.
title FASP: Fast and Accurate Structured Pruning of Large Language Models
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.09412