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SLEB: Streamlining LLMs through Redundancy Verification and Elimination of Transformer Blocks

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arxiv 2402.09025 v6 pith:FQLRKD3L submitted 2024-02-14 cs.CL cs.LG

SLEB: Streamlining LLMs through Redundancy Verification and Elimination of Transformer Blocks

classification cs.CL cs.LG
keywords llmsslebpruningblockstransformerinferencelanguagelarge
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Large language models (LLMs) have proven to be highly effective across various natural language processing tasks. However, their large number of parameters poses significant challenges for practical deployment. Pruning, a technique aimed at reducing the size and complexity of LLMs, offers a potential solution by removing redundant components from the network. Despite the promise of pruning, existing methods often struggle to achieve substantial end-to-end LLM inference speedup. In this paper, we introduce SLEB, a novel approach designed to streamline LLMs by eliminating redundant transformer blocks. We choose the transformer block as the fundamental unit for pruning, because LLMs exhibit block-level redundancy with high similarity between the outputs of neighboring blocks. This choice allows us to effectively enhance the processing speed of LLMs. Our experimental results demonstrate that SLEB outperforms previous LLM pruning methods in accelerating LLM inference while also maintaining superior perplexity and accuracy, making SLEB as a promising technique for enhancing the efficiency of LLMs. The code is available at: https://github.com/jiwonsong-dev/SLEB.

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Forward citations

Cited by 6 Pith papers

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

  1. Understanding Performance Collapse in Layer-Pruned Large Language Models via Decision Representation Transitions

    cs.CL 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Performance collapse in layer-pruned LLMs stems from disrupting the Silent Phase of decision-making, which blocks the transition to correct predictions, while the later Decisive Phase is robust to pruning.

  2. DOT-MoE: Differentiable Optimal Transport for MoEfication

    cs.LG 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    DOT-MoE uses differentiable optimal transport and straight-through estimators to partition FFN layers into capacity-constrained experts, outperforming heuristic baselines in retaining 90% performance at 50% active parameters.

  3. No Free Swap: Protocol-Dependent Layer Redundancy in Transformers

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Replacement and interchange swap-KL protocols for layer redundancy in transformers disagree on pruning safety, with the gap growing during training on Pythia models and producing different removal costs on Qwen3-8B ve...

  4. TAPIOCA: Why Task- Aware Pruning Improves OOD model Capability

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Task-aware pruning improves OOD performance by removing layers that distort task-adapted representation profiles, realigning OOD inputs with the geometry observed on ID data.

  5. TAPIOCA: Why Task- Aware Pruning Improves OOD model Capability

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Task-aware pruning improves OOD model performance by realigning distorted OOD layerwise norm and pairwise-distance profiles with the task-adapted geometry observed on ID inputs.

  6. On the Limits of Layer Pruning for Generative Reasoning in Large Language Models

    cs.LG 2026-02 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Layer pruning preserves classification performance in LLMs but fundamentally limits recovery of generative reasoning capabilities even after extensive self-supervised finetuning.