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SparseGPT: Massive Language Models Can Be Accurately Pruned in One-Shot

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arxiv 2301.00774 v3 pith:6XMQUCC4 submitted 2023-01-02 cs.LG

SparseGPT: Massive Language Models Can Be Accurately Pruned in One-Shot

classification cs.LG
keywords modelssparsegptaccuratelyavailablemassiveone-shotprunedsparsity
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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We show for the first time that large-scale generative pretrained transformer (GPT) family models can be pruned to at least 50% sparsity in one-shot, without any retraining, at minimal loss of accuracy. This is achieved via a new pruning method called SparseGPT, specifically designed to work efficiently and accurately on massive GPT-family models. We can execute SparseGPT on the largest available open-source models, OPT-175B and BLOOM-176B, in under 4.5 hours, and can reach 60% unstructured sparsity with negligible increase in perplexity: remarkably, more than 100 billion weights from these models can be ignored at inference time. SparseGPT generalizes to semi-structured (2:4 and 4:8) patterns, and is compatible with weight quantization approaches. The code is available at: https://github.com/IST-DASLab/sparsegpt.

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