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Main Authors: Mugnaini, Leandro Giusti, Yamamoto, Bruno Lopes, de Alcantara, Lucas Lauton, Zacarias, Victor, Bollis, Edson, Pellicer, Lucas, Costa, Anna Helena Reali, Jordao, Artur
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.21174
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author Mugnaini, Leandro Giusti
Yamamoto, Bruno Lopes
de Alcantara, Lucas Lauton
Zacarias, Victor
Bollis, Edson
Pellicer, Lucas
Costa, Anna Helena Reali
Jordao, Artur
author_facet Mugnaini, Leandro Giusti
Yamamoto, Bruno Lopes
de Alcantara, Lucas Lauton
Zacarias, Victor
Bollis, Edson
Pellicer, Lucas
Costa, Anna Helena Reali
Jordao, Artur
contents Deep learning drives a new wave in computing systems and triggers the automation of increasingly complex problems. In particular, Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced cognitive tasks, often matching or even surpassing human-level performance. However, their extensive parameters result in high computational costs and slow inference, posing challenges for deployment in resource-limited settings. Among the strategies to overcome the aforementioned challenges, pruning emerges as a successful mechanism since it reduces model size while maintaining predictive ability. In this paper, we introduce AMP: Attention Heads and MLP Pruning, a novel structured pruning method that efficiently compresses LLMs by removing less critical structures within Multi-Head Attention (MHA) and Multilayer Perceptron (MLP). By projecting the input data onto weights, AMP assesses structural importance and overcomes the limitations of existing techniques, which often fall short in flexibility or efficiency. In particular, AMP surpasses the current state-of-the-art on commonsense reasoning tasks by up to 1.49 percentage points, achieving a 30% pruning ratio with minimal impact on zero-shot task performance. Moreover, AMP also improves inference speeds, making it well-suited for deployment in resource-constrained environments. We confirm the flexibility of AMP on different families of LLMs, including LLaMA and Phi.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_21174
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Efficient LLMs with AMP: Attention Heads and MLP Pruning
Mugnaini, Leandro Giusti
Yamamoto, Bruno Lopes
de Alcantara, Lucas Lauton
Zacarias, Victor
Bollis, Edson
Pellicer, Lucas
Costa, Anna Helena Reali
Jordao, Artur
Machine Learning
Deep learning drives a new wave in computing systems and triggers the automation of increasingly complex problems. In particular, Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced cognitive tasks, often matching or even surpassing human-level performance. However, their extensive parameters result in high computational costs and slow inference, posing challenges for deployment in resource-limited settings. Among the strategies to overcome the aforementioned challenges, pruning emerges as a successful mechanism since it reduces model size while maintaining predictive ability. In this paper, we introduce AMP: Attention Heads and MLP Pruning, a novel structured pruning method that efficiently compresses LLMs by removing less critical structures within Multi-Head Attention (MHA) and Multilayer Perceptron (MLP). By projecting the input data onto weights, AMP assesses structural importance and overcomes the limitations of existing techniques, which often fall short in flexibility or efficiency. In particular, AMP surpasses the current state-of-the-art on commonsense reasoning tasks by up to 1.49 percentage points, achieving a 30% pruning ratio with minimal impact on zero-shot task performance. Moreover, AMP also improves inference speeds, making it well-suited for deployment in resource-constrained environments. We confirm the flexibility of AMP on different families of LLMs, including LLaMA and Phi.
title Efficient LLMs with AMP: Attention Heads and MLP Pruning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.21174