Pith. sign in

REVIEW 6 cited by

SkipGPT: Dynamic Layer Pruning Reinvented with Token Awareness and Module Decoupling

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

arxiv 2506.04179 v1 pith:CHGU24OW submitted 2025-06-04 cs.CL

SkipGPT: Dynamic Layer Pruning Reinvented with Token Awareness and Module Decoupling

classification cs.CL
keywords pruningskipgptlayerdynamicdynamicsperformanceacrosscomputational
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
0 comments
Share X Bluesky LinkedIn Reddit HN
read the original abstract

Large language models (LLMs) achieve remarkable performance across tasks but incur substantial computational costs due to their deep, multi-layered architectures. Layer pruning has emerged as a strategy to alleviate these inefficiencies, but conventional static pruning methods overlook two critical dynamics inherent to LLM inference: (1) horizontal dynamics, where token-level heterogeneity demands context-aware pruning decisions, and (2) vertical dynamics, where the distinct functional roles of MLP and self-attention layers necessitate component-specific pruning policies. We introduce SkipGPT, a dynamic layer pruning framework designed to optimize computational resource allocation through two core innovations: (1) global token-aware routing to prioritize critical tokens, and (2) decoupled pruning policies for MLP and self-attention components. To mitigate training instability, we propose a two-stage optimization paradigm: first, a disentangled training phase that learns routing strategies via soft parameterization to avoid premature pruning decisions, followed by parameter-efficient LoRA fine-tuning to restore performance impacted by layer removal. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SkipGPT reduces over 40% of model parameters while matching or exceeding the performance of the original dense model across benchmarks. By harmonizing dynamic efficiency with preserved expressivity, SkipGPT advances the practical deployment of scalable, resource-aware LLMs. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/EIT-NLP/SkipGPT.

discussion (0)

Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.

Forward citations

Cited by 6 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Do All Individual Layers Help? An Empirical Study of Task-Interfering Layers in Vision-Language Models

    cs.AI 2026-02 conditional novelty 7.0

    Empirical analysis identifies task-interfering layers in VLMs and proposes TaLo, a test-time method to bypass them for improved performance without training.

  2. End-to-End Dynamic Sparsity for Resource-Adaptive LLM Inference

    cs.IR 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    L2A trains one LLM with input-and-budget-conditioned gates to adapt sparsity across layers, heads, and tokens, tracing the compute-accuracy frontier while staying within 0.6% of dense performance at 34% layer sparsity...

  3. CascadeFormer: Depth-Tapered Transformers Motivated by Gradient Fan-in Asymmetry

    cs.LG 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    CascadeFormer tapers Transformer width with depth based on gradient fan-in asymmetry to match uniform baselines in perplexity while cutting latency 8.6%.

  4. ProactiveLLM: Learning Active Interaction for Streaming Large Language Models

    cs.CL 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    ProactiveLLM enables active interaction in streaming LLMs by learning semantic sufficiency cues from partial inputs through mask-based modeling and synchronized privileged self-distillation without external supervision.

  5. SkipOPU: An FPGA-based Overlay Processor for Large Language Models with Dynamically Allocated Computation

    cs.AR 2026-03 conditional novelty 6.0

    An FPGA accelerator for SkipGPT-style pruned LLMs that fuses router/normalization/attention computation to hide nonlinear latency, packs two FP16 products in each DSP, and serves reused KV entries from on-chip URAM to...

  6. ViCA: Efficient Multimodal LLMs with Vision-Only Cross-Attention

    cs.CV 2026-02 conditional novelty 6.0

    Frozen visual tokens with sparse cross-attention at selected layers preserve 98% accuracy while reducing vision-side FLOPs to 4% in LLaVA-1.5 models.