TSENOR: Highly-Efficient Algorithm for Finding Transposable N:M Sparse Masks
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arXiv
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| Autori principali: | , , |
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| Natura: | Preprint |
| Pubblicazione: |
2025
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| _version_ | 1866913866631348224 |
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| author | Meng, Xiang Makni, Mehdi Mazumder, Rahul |
| author_facet | Meng, Xiang Makni, Mehdi Mazumder, Rahul |
| contents | Network pruning reduces the computational requirements of large neural networks, with N:M sparsity -- retaining only N out of every M consecutive weights -- offering a compelling balance between compressed model quality and hardware acceleration. However, N:M sparsity only accelerates forward-pass computations, as N:M patterns are not preserved during matrix transposition, limiting efficiency during training where both passes are computationally intensive. While transposable N:M sparsity has been proposed to address this limitation, existing methods for finding transposable N:M sparse masks either fail to scale to large models or are restricted to M=4 which results in suboptimal compression-accuracy trade-off. We introduce an efficient solver for transposable N:M masks that scales to billion-parameter models. We formulate mask generation as optimal transport problems and solve through entropy regularization and Dykstra's algorithm, followed by a rounding procedure. Our tensor-based implementation exploits GPU parallelism, achieving up to 100x speedup with only 1-10% error compared to existing methods. Our approach can be integrated with layer-wise N:M pruning frameworks including Wanda, SparseGPT and ALPS to produce transposable N:M sparse models with arbitrary N:M values. Experiments show that LLaMA3.2-8B with transposable 16:32 sparsity maintains performance close to its standard N:M counterpart and outperforms standard 2:4 sparse model, showing the practical value of our approach. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_23949 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | TSENOR: Highly-Efficient Algorithm for Finding Transposable N:M Sparse Masks Meng, Xiang Makni, Mehdi Mazumder, Rahul Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence Network pruning reduces the computational requirements of large neural networks, with N:M sparsity -- retaining only N out of every M consecutive weights -- offering a compelling balance between compressed model quality and hardware acceleration. However, N:M sparsity only accelerates forward-pass computations, as N:M patterns are not preserved during matrix transposition, limiting efficiency during training where both passes are computationally intensive. While transposable N:M sparsity has been proposed to address this limitation, existing methods for finding transposable N:M sparse masks either fail to scale to large models or are restricted to M=4 which results in suboptimal compression-accuracy trade-off. We introduce an efficient solver for transposable N:M masks that scales to billion-parameter models. We formulate mask generation as optimal transport problems and solve through entropy regularization and Dykstra's algorithm, followed by a rounding procedure. Our tensor-based implementation exploits GPU parallelism, achieving up to 100x speedup with only 1-10% error compared to existing methods. Our approach can be integrated with layer-wise N:M pruning frameworks including Wanda, SparseGPT and ALPS to produce transposable N:M sparse models with arbitrary N:M values. Experiments show that LLaMA3.2-8B with transposable 16:32 sparsity maintains performance close to its standard N:M counterpart and outperforms standard 2:4 sparse model, showing the practical value of our approach. |
| title | TSENOR: Highly-Efficient Algorithm for Finding Transposable N:M Sparse Masks |
| topic | Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.23949 |