Fast And Effective Weight Update For Pruned Large Language Models

Boža Vladimír. Arxiv 2024

[Paper] [Code]    
Efficiency And Optimization Fine Tuning Has Code Pretraining Methods Pruning Training Techniques

Pruning large language models (LLMs) is a challenging task due to their enormous size. The primary difficulty is fine-tuning the model after pruning, which is needed to recover the lost performance caused by dropping weights. Recent approaches have either ignored fine-tuning entirely, focusing on efficient pruning criteria, or attempted layer-wise weight updates, preserving the behavior of each layer. However, even layer-wise weight updates can be costly for LLMs, and previous works have resorted to various approximations. In our paper, we propose a fast and effective weight update algorithm for pruned layers based on the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM). We further extend it with a simple gradual pruning mask selection and achieve state-of-the-art pruning performance across a wide range of LLMs. Code is available at https://github.com/fmfi-compbio/admm-pruning.

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