SlimLLM: Accurate Structured Pruning for Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Guo, Jialong, Chen, Xinghao, Tang, Yehui, Wang, Yunhe
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Guo, Jialong
Chen, Xinghao
Tang, Yehui
Wang, Yunhe
author_facet Guo, Jialong
Chen, Xinghao
Tang, Yehui
Wang, Yunhe
contents Large language models(LLMs) have garnered significant attention and demonstrated impressive capabilities in a wide range of applications. However, due to their enormous computational costs, the deployment and application of LLMs are often severely limited. To address this issue, structured pruning is an effective solution to compress the parameters of LLMs. Determining the importance of each sub-module in LLMs and minimizing performance loss are critical issues that need to be carefully addressed in structured pruning. In this paper, we propose an effective and fast structured pruning method named SlimLLM for large language models. For channel and attention head pruning, we evaluate the importance based on the entire channel or head, rather than merely aggregating the importance of individual elements within a sub-module. This approach enables a more holistic consideration of the interdependence among elements within the sub-module. In addition, we design a simple linear regression strategy for the output matrix to quickly recover performance. We also propose layer-based importance ratio to determine the pruning ratio for each layer. Based on the LLaMA benchmark results, our SlimLLM outperforms other methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_22689
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SlimLLM: Accurate Structured Pruning for Large Language Models
Guo, Jialong
Chen, Xinghao
Tang, Yehui
Wang, Yunhe
Machine Learning
Large language models(LLMs) have garnered significant attention and demonstrated impressive capabilities in a wide range of applications. However, due to their enormous computational costs, the deployment and application of LLMs are often severely limited. To address this issue, structured pruning is an effective solution to compress the parameters of LLMs. Determining the importance of each sub-module in LLMs and minimizing performance loss are critical issues that need to be carefully addressed in structured pruning. In this paper, we propose an effective and fast structured pruning method named SlimLLM for large language models. For channel and attention head pruning, we evaluate the importance based on the entire channel or head, rather than merely aggregating the importance of individual elements within a sub-module. This approach enables a more holistic consideration of the interdependence among elements within the sub-module. In addition, we design a simple linear regression strategy for the output matrix to quickly recover performance. We also propose layer-based importance ratio to determine the pruning ratio for each layer. Based on the LLaMA benchmark results, our SlimLLM outperforms other methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance.
title SlimLLM: Accurate Structured Pruning for Large Language Models
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.22689