The paper proves negative weight drift at initialization under MSE or cross-entropy with asymmetric activations, links it to up to 90% sparsity in GPT-nano, maps the sparsity-accuracy cliff across 79 configurations, and shows clipped ReLU² and GELU² improve validation loss.
arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.14884 , year=
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Post-training N:M activation pruning preserves generative performance in LLMs better than equivalent weight pruning, with the 8:16 pattern emerging as a practical hardware-friendly choice.
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Bug or Feature$^2$: Weight Drift, Activation Sparsity and Spikes
The paper proves negative weight drift at initialization under MSE or cross-entropy with asymmetric activations, links it to up to 90% sparsity in GPT-nano, maps the sparsity-accuracy cliff across 79 configurations, and shows clipped ReLU² and GELU² improve validation loss.
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Motivating Next-Gen Accelerators with Flexible (N:M) Activation Sparsity via Benchmarking Lightweight Post-Training Sparsification Approaches
Post-training N:M activation pruning preserves generative performance in LLMs better than equivalent weight pruning, with the 8:16 pattern emerging as a practical hardware-friendly choice.