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LaCo: Large Language Model Pruning via Layer Collapse

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arxiv 2402.11187 v2 pith:63A4U2MU submitted 2024-02-17 cs.CL cs.AI

LaCo: Large Language Model Pruning via Layer Collapse

classification cs.CL cs.AI
keywords modellacopruningcollapselayertextitvariousexisting
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Large language models (LLMs) based on transformer are witnessing a notable trend of size expansion, which brings considerable costs to both model training and inference. However, existing methods such as model quantization, knowledge distillation, and model pruning are constrained by various issues, including hardware support limitations, the need for extensive training, and alterations to the model internal structure. In this paper, we propose a concise layer-wise structured pruner called \textit{Layer Collapse (LaCo)}, in which rear model layers collapse into a prior layer, enabling a rapid reduction in model size while preserving the model structure. Comprehensive experiments show that our method maintains an average task performance of over 80\% at pruning ratios of 25-30\%, significantly outperforming existing state-of-the-art structured pruning methods. We also conduct post-training experiments to confirm that the \textit{LaCo} effectively inherits the parameters of the original model. Additionally, we perform ablation studies on various settings of \textit{LaCo}. Finally, we discuss our motivation from the perspective of layer-wise similarity and evaluate the performance of the pruned LLMs across various pruning ratios\footnote{\url{https://github.com/yangyifei729/LaCo}}.

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Forward citations

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