LOST: Low-rank and Sparse Pre-training for Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Li, Jiaxi, Yin, Lu, Shen, Li, Xu, Jinjin, Xu, Liwu, Huang, Tianjin, Wang, Wenwu, Liu, Shiwei, Wang, Xilu
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Li, Jiaxi
Yin, Lu
Shen, Li
Xu, Jinjin
Xu, Liwu
Huang, Tianjin
Wang, Wenwu
Liu, Shiwei
Wang, Xilu
author_facet Li, Jiaxi
Yin, Lu
Shen, Li
Xu, Jinjin
Xu, Liwu
Huang, Tianjin
Wang, Wenwu
Liu, Shiwei
Wang, Xilu
contents While large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks, their massive scale incurs prohibitive computational and memory costs for pre-training from scratch. Recent studies have investigated the use of low-rank parameterization as a means of reducing model size and training cost. In this context, sparsity is often employed as a complementary technique to recover important information lost in low-rank compression by capturing salient features in the residual space. However, existing approaches typically combine low-rank and sparse components in a simplistic or ad hoc manner, often resulting in undesirable performance degradation compared to full-rank training. In this paper, we propose \textbf{LO}w-rank and \textbf{S}parse pre-\textbf{T}raining (\textbf{LOST}) for LLMs, a novel method that ingeniously integrates low-rank and sparse structures to enable effective training of LLMs from scratch under strict efficiency constraints. LOST applies singular value decomposition to weight matrices, preserving the dominant low-rank components, while allocating the remaining singular values to construct channel-wise sparse components to complement the expressiveness of low-rank training. We evaluate LOST on LLM pretraining ranging from 60M to 7B parameters. Our experiments show that LOST achieves competitive or superior performance compared to full-rank models, while significantly reducing both memory and compute overhead. Moreover, Code is available at \href{https://github.com/JiaxiLi1/LOST-Low-rank-and-Sparse-Training-for-Large-Language-Models}{LOST Repo}
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_02668
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LOST: Low-rank and Sparse Pre-training for Large Language Models
Li, Jiaxi
Yin, Lu
Shen, Li
Xu, Jinjin
Xu, Liwu
Huang, Tianjin
Wang, Wenwu
Liu, Shiwei
Wang, Xilu
Machine Learning
While large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks, their massive scale incurs prohibitive computational and memory costs for pre-training from scratch. Recent studies have investigated the use of low-rank parameterization as a means of reducing model size and training cost. In this context, sparsity is often employed as a complementary technique to recover important information lost in low-rank compression by capturing salient features in the residual space. However, existing approaches typically combine low-rank and sparse components in a simplistic or ad hoc manner, often resulting in undesirable performance degradation compared to full-rank training. In this paper, we propose \textbf{LO}w-rank and \textbf{S}parse pre-\textbf{T}raining (\textbf{LOST}) for LLMs, a novel method that ingeniously integrates low-rank and sparse structures to enable effective training of LLMs from scratch under strict efficiency constraints. LOST applies singular value decomposition to weight matrices, preserving the dominant low-rank components, while allocating the remaining singular values to construct channel-wise sparse components to complement the expressiveness of low-rank training. We evaluate LOST on LLM pretraining ranging from 60M to 7B parameters. Our experiments show that LOST achieves competitive or superior performance compared to full-rank models, while significantly reducing both memory and compute overhead. Moreover, Code is available at \href{https://github.com/JiaxiLi1/LOST-Low-rank-and-Sparse-Training-for-Large-Language-Models}{LOST Repo}
title LOST: Low-rank and Sparse Pre-training for Large Language Models
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02668