Týr-the-Pruner: Structural Pruning LLMs via Global Sparsity Distribution Optimization

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Li, Guanchen, Xu, Yixing, Li, Zeping, Liu, Ji, Yin, Xuanwu, Li, Dong, Barsoum, Emad
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866909859327246336
author Li, Guanchen
Xu, Yixing
Li, Zeping
Liu, Ji
Yin, Xuanwu
Li, Dong
Barsoum, Emad
author_facet Li, Guanchen
Xu, Yixing
Li, Zeping
Liu, Ji
Yin, Xuanwu
Li, Dong
Barsoum, Emad
contents Structural pruning enhances hardware-agnostic inference efficiency for large language models (LLMs) yet often fails to maintain comparable performance. Local pruning performs efficient layer-by-layer compression but ignores global topology. Although global pruning aims to identify an optimal sparse model, intuitive methods typically adopt a two-stage paradigm that first evaluates substructure saliency and then applies global pruning, which ignores inter-structure dependencies and fails to achieve end-to-end optimization. To address these limitations, we propose Týr-the-Pruner, an efficient end-to-end search-based global structural pruning framework. This framework constructs a supernet by repeatedly applying local pruning across a range of sparsity ratios to each layer in an LLM, with the core goal of determining the optimal sparsity distribution under a target overall sparsity ratio. Concretely, we introduce an effective local pruning and an expectation error accumulation approach to improve supernet construction. Furthermore, we employ an iterative prune-and-search strategy with coarse-to-fine sparsity granularity to ensure efficient search convergence. Experimental results show that Týr-the-Pruner achieves state-of-the-art structural pruning, retaining 97% of the dense model's performance while removing a challenging 50% of Llama-3.1-70B's parameters. Code will be available at https://github.com/AMD-AGI/Tyr-the-Pruner.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_09657
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Týr-the-Pruner: Structural Pruning LLMs via Global Sparsity Distribution Optimization
Li, Guanchen
Xu, Yixing
Li, Zeping
Liu, Ji
Yin, Xuanwu
Li, Dong
Barsoum, Emad
Machine Learning
Structural pruning enhances hardware-agnostic inference efficiency for large language models (LLMs) yet often fails to maintain comparable performance. Local pruning performs efficient layer-by-layer compression but ignores global topology. Although global pruning aims to identify an optimal sparse model, intuitive methods typically adopt a two-stage paradigm that first evaluates substructure saliency and then applies global pruning, which ignores inter-structure dependencies and fails to achieve end-to-end optimization. To address these limitations, we propose Týr-the-Pruner, an efficient end-to-end search-based global structural pruning framework. This framework constructs a supernet by repeatedly applying local pruning across a range of sparsity ratios to each layer in an LLM, with the core goal of determining the optimal sparsity distribution under a target overall sparsity ratio. Concretely, we introduce an effective local pruning and an expectation error accumulation approach to improve supernet construction. Furthermore, we employ an iterative prune-and-search strategy with coarse-to-fine sparsity granularity to ensure efficient search convergence. Experimental results show that Týr-the-Pruner achieves state-of-the-art structural pruning, retaining 97% of the dense model's performance while removing a challenging 50% of Llama-3.1-70B's parameters. Code will be available at https://github.com/AMD-AGI/Tyr-the-Pruner.
title Týr-the-Pruner: Structural Pruning LLMs via Global Sparsity Distribution Optimization
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.09657