Mingkuan Feng, Jinyang Wu, Siyuan Liu, Shuai Zhang, Hongjian Fang, Ruihan Jin, Feihu Che, Pengpeng Shao, Zhengqi Wen, Jianhua Tao
| Challenge: | Structural pruning is a promising solution for large language models . prior structured pruning methods remove unimportant parameters based on certain metrics . |
| Approach: | They propose a structural pruning method that iteratively learns the weights of transformer layers by adding their l1-norm to the loss function. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pruning method outperforms strong layer-wise pruning methods without requiring retraining. |
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Structured Pruning for Large Language Models Using Coupled Components Elimination and Minor Fine-tuning (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated powerful capabilities in natural language processing, yet their vast number of parameters poses challenges for deployment and inference efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a structured pruning algorithm that derives the importance of different components based on intermediate data dependencies and removes coupled components across different layers simultaneously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm reduces model size and accelerates inference without specialized operators and libraries, while maintaining its utility as versatile problem solvers. |
Pruning Foundation Models for High Accuracy without Retraining (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Despite the superior performance of foundation models, it is challenging to deploy large language models in practical applications due to their massive parameters and computations. |
| Approach: | They propose a pruning algorithm to prune LLMs in one-shot without retraining . they propose retrainable pruning algorithms to prune multiple weights in LLM . |
| Outcome: | The proposed pruning methods perform better than baseline pruning methods on sparse and unstructured sparsity models. |
LaCo: Large Language Model Pruning via Layer Collapse (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for model quantization, knowledge distillation, and model pruning are limited by hardware support limitations and the need for extensive training. |
| Approach: | They propose a layer-wise structured pruner that collapses rear model layers into a prior layer and enables a rapid reduction in model size while preserving the model structure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pruner outperforms state-of-the-art pruning methods at pruning ratios of 25-30% and maintains an average task performance of over 80% at different pruning ratio. |
GAP: a Global Adaptive Pruning Method for Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing structured pruning methods employ uniform compression rates across network layers, neglecting the varying importance of different network depths. |
| Approach: | They propose a pruning framework that minimizes global capability loss by layer-adaptive pruning rates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves comparable performance with state-of-the-art methods at high pruning rates and shows significant advantages at low pruning rates. |
From Local to Global: Revisiting Structured Pruning Paradigms for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Ziyan Wang, Enmao Diao, Qi Le, Pu Wang, Minwoo Lee, Shu-ping Yeh, Evgeny Stupachenko, Hao Feng, Li Yang
| Challenge: | Structured pruning is a practical approach to deploying large language models (LLMs) but it fails to capitalize on modest task-specific calibration signals, causing limited downstream gains. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that removes attention heads and MLP channels using loss-based important scores . they use perplexity for language modeling and a margin-based objective for decision-style tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method lowers perplexity and improves accuracy at higher sparsity . it also stabilizes accuracy and mitigates perxity collapse without fine-tuning . |
Structured Pruning for Efficient Generative Pre-trained Language Models (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large-scale generative Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) are limited in their deployment in real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose to prune the feed-forward networks of generative pre-trained language models to smaller widths without designing extra operators. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 1.51x/6.96x inference speedup on GPU/CPU with 67% size reduction. |
DRPruning: Efficient Large Language Model Pruning through Distributionally Robust Optimization (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Structured pruning reduces model size but often causes uneven degradation across domains, leading to biased performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that dynamically adjusts the data distribution during training to restore balanced performance across heterogeneous and multi-tasking data. |
| Outcome: | Experiments in monolingual and multilingual settings show that the proposed method surpasses similarly sized models in pruning and continued pretraining over perplexity, downstream tasks, and instruction tuning. |
BlockPruner: Fine-grained Pruning for Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have significant computational and memory costs associated with training and inference. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free structured pruning approach that targets redundancies in MHA and MLP blocks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pruning approach achieves more granular and effective pruning compared to state-of-the-art pruning methods. |
Bypass Back-propagation: Optimization-based Structural Pruning for Large Language Models via Policy Gradient (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent pruning methods rely on heuristically hand-crafted metrics, leading to suboptimal performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that optimizes pruning masks by minimizing back-propagation . they learn an underlying Bernoulli distribution to sample binary pruning mask samples . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is able to support global and heterogeneous pruning without back-propagation. |
IG-Pruning: Input-Guided Block Pruning for Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for efficient inference rely on fixed block masks, which can lead to suboptimal performance. |
| Approach: | They propose an input-aware block-wise pruning method that dynamically selects layer masks at inference time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art static depth pruning methods . it is particularly suitable for resource-constrained deployment scenarios . |