按矩阵运算维度重新分类剪枝方法,揭示真实加速效果的差异。
Beyond FLOPs: Benchmarking Real Inference Acceleration of LLM Pruning under a GEMM-Centric Taxonomy

- 以GEMM的M/N/K维度重构剪枝方法分类体系
- 实测显示静态深度剪枝在内存受限场景下最优
- 动态深度剪枝适合中等精度损失,宽度剪枝适用于高损失场景
剪枝已成为加速大语言模型推理的主要范式,涵盖从词元、层、注意力头、维度到注意力模式等多个层面的计算裁剪。尽管目标一致,不同剪枝方法引发的本质执行行为差异导致实际加速效果高度依赖硬件与内核实现,其真实性能优势尚不明确。本文提出一种面向通用矩阵乘法(GEMM)的中心化分类体系,依据逻辑上的M、N、K维度对现有剪枝方法进行重构。基于此抽象,构建统一基准测试框架,实现剪枝设计空间内的一致性比较,并系统刻画加速与质量的帕累托前沿。在Llama3.1-8B上的实验表明:静态深度剪枝在内存受限场景中仍为最优基线,最接近理论加速上限;预填充阶段,帕累托前沿从低损失(0%–4%)时的静态深度剪枝,过渡到中等损失(5%–16%)的动态深度剪枝,最终演变为高损失(17%–26%)下的静态宽度剪枝。该工作首次建立剪枝加速的统一实践视图,为后续研究提供指导。代码已开源。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Pruning has emerged as a dominant paradigm for accelerating large language model (LLM) inference, spanning a broad spectrum of methods that remove computation across tokens, layers, heads, dimensions, and attention patterns. Despite sharing the same objective, these pruning approaches induce fundamentally different execution behaviors, causing realized speedups to depend heavily on hardware and kernel implementations. Consequently, the practical acceleration benefits of different pruning families remain poorly understood. In this work, we introduce a GEMM-centric taxonomy that reorganizes existing pruning methods according to the logical \textbf{M}, \textbf{N}, and \textbf{K} dimensions of general matrix multiplication (GEMM). Leveraging this abstraction, we build a unified benchmarking framework that enables implementation-consistent comparison across the pruning design space and systematically characterizes the acceleration--quality Pareto frontier. Our results on Llama3.1-8B show that static depth pruning remains the strongest Pareto-optimal baseline and stays closest to its theoretical acceleration upper bound in memory-bounded scenarios. During prefill, the frontier transitions from static depth at low quality loss (0\%--4\%), to dynamic depth at moderate loss (5\%--16\%), and finally to static width pruning at higher loss levels (17\%--26\%). These findings establish the first unified view of the practical limits of pruning-based LLM acceleration and provide guidance for future pruning research. Code is available at https://github.com/EIT-NLP/LLM-Pruning/tree/main/PruningInferSim
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