Minitron-SSM: Efficient Hybrid Language Model Compression through Group-Aware SSM Pruning

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Hauptverfasser: Taghibakhshi, Ali, Sreenivas, Sharath Turuvekere, Muralidharan, Saurav, Chochowski, Marcin, Karnati, Yashaswi, Joshi, Raviraj, Mahabaleshwarkar, Ameya Sunil, Chen, Zijia, Suhara, Yoshi, Olabiyi, Oluwatobi, Korzekwa, Daniel, Patwary, Mostofa, Shoeybi, Mohammad, Kautz, Jan, Catanzaro, Bryan, Aithal, Ashwath, Tajbakhsh, Nima, Molchanov, Pavlo
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Taghibakhshi, Ali
Sreenivas, Sharath Turuvekere
Muralidharan, Saurav
Chochowski, Marcin
Karnati, Yashaswi
Joshi, Raviraj
Mahabaleshwarkar, Ameya Sunil
Chen, Zijia
Suhara, Yoshi
Olabiyi, Oluwatobi
Korzekwa, Daniel
Patwary, Mostofa
Shoeybi, Mohammad
Kautz, Jan
Catanzaro, Bryan
Aithal, Ashwath
Tajbakhsh, Nima
Molchanov, Pavlo
author_facet Taghibakhshi, Ali
Sreenivas, Sharath Turuvekere
Muralidharan, Saurav
Chochowski, Marcin
Karnati, Yashaswi
Joshi, Raviraj
Mahabaleshwarkar, Ameya Sunil
Chen, Zijia
Suhara, Yoshi
Olabiyi, Oluwatobi
Korzekwa, Daniel
Patwary, Mostofa
Shoeybi, Mohammad
Kautz, Jan
Catanzaro, Bryan
Aithal, Ashwath
Tajbakhsh, Nima
Molchanov, Pavlo
contents Hybrid LLM architectures that combine Attention and State Space Models (SSMs) achieve state-of-the-art accuracy and runtime performance. Recent work has demonstrated that applying compression and distillation to Attention-only models yields smaller, more accurate models at a fraction of the training cost. In this work, we explore the effectiveness of compressing Hybrid architectures. We introduce a novel group-aware pruning strategy that preserves the structural integrity of SSM blocks and their sequence modeling capabilities. Furthermore, we demonstrate the necessity of such SSM pruning to achieve improved accuracy and inference speed compared to traditional approaches. Our compression recipe combines SSM, FFN, embedding dimension, and layer pruning, followed by knowledge distillation-based retraining, similar to the MINITRON technique. Using this approach, we compress the Nemotron-H 8B Hybrid model down to 4B parameters with up to 40x fewer training tokens. The resulting model surpasses the accuracy of similarly-sized models while achieving 2x faster inference, significantly advancing the Pareto frontier.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_11409
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Minitron-SSM: Efficient Hybrid Language Model Compression through Group-Aware SSM Pruning
Taghibakhshi, Ali
Sreenivas, Sharath Turuvekere
Muralidharan, Saurav
Chochowski, Marcin
Karnati, Yashaswi
Joshi, Raviraj
Mahabaleshwarkar, Ameya Sunil
Chen, Zijia
Suhara, Yoshi
Olabiyi, Oluwatobi
Korzekwa, Daniel
Patwary, Mostofa
Shoeybi, Mohammad
Kautz, Jan
Catanzaro, Bryan
Aithal, Ashwath
Tajbakhsh, Nima
Molchanov, Pavlo
Computation and Language
Hybrid LLM architectures that combine Attention and State Space Models (SSMs) achieve state-of-the-art accuracy and runtime performance. Recent work has demonstrated that applying compression and distillation to Attention-only models yields smaller, more accurate models at a fraction of the training cost. In this work, we explore the effectiveness of compressing Hybrid architectures. We introduce a novel group-aware pruning strategy that preserves the structural integrity of SSM blocks and their sequence modeling capabilities. Furthermore, we demonstrate the necessity of such SSM pruning to achieve improved accuracy and inference speed compared to traditional approaches. Our compression recipe combines SSM, FFN, embedding dimension, and layer pruning, followed by knowledge distillation-based retraining, similar to the MINITRON technique. Using this approach, we compress the Nemotron-H 8B Hybrid model down to 4B parameters with up to 40x fewer training tokens. The resulting model surpasses the accuracy of similarly-sized models while achieving 2x faster inference, significantly advancing the Pareto frontier.
title Minitron-SSM: Efficient Hybrid Language Model Compression through Group-Aware SSM Pruning
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.11409