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Hauptverfasser: Xu, Chi, Zhang, Gefei, Zhu, Yantong, Benini, Luca, Hu, Guosheng, Li, Yawei, Zhang, Zhihong
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.11164
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author Xu, Chi
Zhang, Gefei
Zhu, Yantong
Benini, Luca
Hu, Guosheng
Li, Yawei
Zhang, Zhihong
author_facet Xu, Chi
Zhang, Gefei
Zhu, Yantong
Benini, Luca
Hu, Guosheng
Li, Yawei
Zhang, Zhihong
contents N:M structured pruning is essential for large language models (LLMs) because it can remove less important network weights and reduce the memory and computation requirements. Existing pruning methods mainly focus on designing metrics to measure the importance of network components to guide pruning. Apart from the impact of these metrics, we observe that different layers have different sensitivities over the network performance. Thus, we propose an efficient method based on the trace of Fisher Information Matrix (FIM) to quantitatively measure and verify the different sensitivities across layers. Based on this, we propose Mixed Sparsity Pruning (MSP) which uses a pruning-oriented evolutionary algorithm (EA) to determine the optimal sparsity levels for different layers. To guarantee fast convergence and achieve promising performance, we utilize efficient FIM-inspired layer-wise sensitivity to initialize the population of EA. In addition, our MSP can work as a plug-and-play module, ready to be integrated into existing pruning methods. Extensive experiments on LLaMA and LLaMA-2 on language modeling and zero-shot tasks demonstrate our superior performance. In particular, in extreme pruning ratio (e.g. 75%), our method significantly outperforms existing methods in terms of perplexity (PPL) by orders of magnitude (Figure 1).
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_11164
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Extreme Pruning of LLMs with Plug-and-Play Mixed Sparsity
Xu, Chi
Zhang, Gefei
Zhu, Yantong
Benini, Luca
Hu, Guosheng
Li, Yawei
Zhang, Zhihong
Computation and Language
N:M structured pruning is essential for large language models (LLMs) because it can remove less important network weights and reduce the memory and computation requirements. Existing pruning methods mainly focus on designing metrics to measure the importance of network components to guide pruning. Apart from the impact of these metrics, we observe that different layers have different sensitivities over the network performance. Thus, we propose an efficient method based on the trace of Fisher Information Matrix (FIM) to quantitatively measure and verify the different sensitivities across layers. Based on this, we propose Mixed Sparsity Pruning (MSP) which uses a pruning-oriented evolutionary algorithm (EA) to determine the optimal sparsity levels for different layers. To guarantee fast convergence and achieve promising performance, we utilize efficient FIM-inspired layer-wise sensitivity to initialize the population of EA. In addition, our MSP can work as a plug-and-play module, ready to be integrated into existing pruning methods. Extensive experiments on LLaMA and LLaMA-2 on language modeling and zero-shot tasks demonstrate our superior performance. In particular, in extreme pruning ratio (e.g. 75%), our method significantly outperforms existing methods in terms of perplexity (PPL) by orders of magnitude (Figure 1).
title Towards Extreme Pruning of LLMs with Plug-and-Play Mixed Sparsity
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.11164