REVIEW 17 cited by
Outlier Weighed Layerwise Sparsity (OWL): A Missing Secret Sauce for Pruning LLMs to High Sparsity
Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.
This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.
SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event
T0 review · schema-true
One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.
pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp
Outlier Weighed Layerwise Sparsity (OWL): A Missing Secret Sauce for Pruning LLMs to High Sparsity
read the original abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs), renowned for their remarkable performance across diverse domains, present a challenge when it comes to practical deployment due to their colossal model size. In response to this challenge, efforts have been directed toward the application of traditional network pruning techniques to LLMs, uncovering a massive number of parameters that can be pruned in one-shot without hurting performance. Prevailing LLM pruning strategies have consistently adhered to the practice of uniformly pruning all layers at equivalent sparsity, resulting in robust performance. However, this observation stands in contrast to the prevailing trends observed in the field of vision models, where non-uniform layerwise sparsity typically yields stronger results. To understand the underlying reasons for this disparity, we conduct a comprehensive study and discover a strong correlation with the emergence of activation outliers in LLMs. Inspired by this finding, we introduce a novel LLM pruning methodology that incorporates a tailored set of non-uniform layerwise sparsity ratios, termed as Outlier Weighed Layerwise sparsity (OWL). The sparsity ratio of OWL is proportional to the outlier ratio observed within each layer, facilitating a more effective alignment between layerwise weight sparsity and outlier ratios. Our empirical evaluation, conducted across the LLaMA-V1 family and OPT, spanning various benchmarks, demonstrates the distinct advantages offered by OWL over previous methods. For instance, OWL exhibits a remarkable performance gain, surpassing the state-of-the-art Wanda and SparseGPT by 61.22 and 6.80 perplexity at a high sparsity level of 70%, respectively, while delivering 2.6x end-to-end inference speed-up in the DeepSparse inference engine. Codes are available at https://github.com/luuyin/OWL.
Forward citations
Cited by 17 Pith papers
-
HodgeCover: Higher-Order Topological Coverage Drives Compression of Sparse Mixture-of-Experts
HodgeCover isolates the harmonic kernel of a simplicial Laplacian on an expert 2-complex to identify irreducible merge cycles and selects experts for aggressive compression, matching or exceeding baselines on open-wei...
-
Less is MoE: Trimming Experts in Domain-Specialist Language Models
Fisher-MoE prunes sparse intermediate dimensions in MoE FFNs ranked by Fisher importance, delivering 50% compression that preserves capability while cutting memory ~45% and raising throughput 21%.
-
Topology-Aware Layer Pruning for Large Vision-Language Models
A topology-aware pruning framework models layer representation evolution in LVLMs via simplicial complexes and zigzag persistent homology to enable adaptive removal of layers while outperforming existing methods on mu...
-
EvoESAP: Non-Uniform Expert Pruning for Sparse MoE
EvoESAP uses evolutionary search guided by a speculative-decoding-inspired ESAP metric to discover non-uniform layer-wise sparsity allocations for MoE expert pruning, improving generation accuracy up to 19.6% at 50% sparsity.
-
HORST: Composing Optimizer Geometries for Sparse Transformer Training
HORST uses non-commutative operator composition and a hyperbolic mirror map to combine stability from adaptive optimizers with L1 sparsity bias, outperforming AdamW across sparsity levels on vision and language tasks.
-
SparseForge: Efficient Semi-Structured LLM Sparsification via Annealing of Hessian-Guided Soft-Mask
SparseForge achieves 57.27% zero-shot accuracy on LLaMA-2-7B at 2:4 sparsity using only 5B retraining tokens, beating the dense baseline and nearly matching a 40B-token SOTA method.
-
Statistically-Lossless Quantization of Large Language Models
SLQ achieves task-lossless LLM quantization below 4 bits per parameter and distribution-lossless at 5-6 bits on average, with 1.7-3.6x speedups over FP16.
-
Topology-Aware Layer Pruning for Large Vision-Language Models
Zigzag persistent homology on layer-wise hidden-state point clouds guides adaptive layer pruning of LVLMs and reportedly beats prior pruning methods across sparsity levels.
-
Resting Neurons, Active Insights: Robustifying Activation Sparsity in LLMs via Spontaneity
SPON adds learnable persistent activation anchors trained via distribution matching to restore LLM accuracy under high activation sparsity by preventing representational distribution shifts.
-
MaskPro: Linear-Space Probabilistic Learning for Strict (N:M)-Sparsity on LLMs
MaskPro learns categorical distributions over groups of M weights to generate exact (N:M) sparsity via N-way sampling without replacement and stabilizes training with a moving average tracker of loss residuals.
-
H$_2$O: Heavy-Hitter Oracle for Efficient Generative Inference of Large Language Models
H2O evicts non-heavy-hitter tokens from the KV cache using a dynamic submodular policy, retaining recent and frequent-co-occurrence tokens to reduce memory while preserving accuracy.
-
Complexity-Guided Component-wise Initialization for Language Model Pretraining
Coarse component-wise spectral matching of pretrained GPT-2 weights changes structure but does not beat standard initialization, while direct weight reuse remains competitive.
-
TIDE: Every Layer Knows the Token Beneath the Context
TIDE augments standard transformers with per-layer token embedding injection via an ensemble of memory blocks and a depth-conditioned router to mitigate rare-token undertraining and contextual collapse.
-
On the Limits of Layer Pruning for Generative Reasoning in Large Language Models
Layer pruning preserves classification performance in LLMs but fundamentally limits recovery of generative reasoning capabilities even after extensive self-supervised finetuning.
-
Resting Neurons, Active Insights: Robustifying Activation Sparsity in LLMs via Spontaneity
SPON adds a small set of trainable input-independent activation vectors as representational anchors, trained by distribution matching, to stabilize sparse activation in LLMs and recover performance lost to hidden-stat...
-
RAP: Runtime Adaptive Pruning for LLM Inference
RAP is a reinforcement learning framework for runtime-adaptive pruning of LLMs that jointly optimizes model weights and KV-cache usage under varying memory budgets.
-
A Comprehensive Overview of Large Language Models
A survey paper providing an overview of Large Language Models, their background, and recent advances in the field.
discussion (0)
Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.