提出混合稀疏密集格式,实现大模型推理加速且不损失精度。
SpenseGPT: Practical One-shot Pruning Enabling Sparse and Dense GEMMs for LLM Inference
- 将权重矩阵分为2:4稀疏区和密集区,兼容现有计算库。
- 在B200 GPU上实现最高1.2倍解码速度提升,精度不变。
- 无需特殊编译器支持,适合实际部署的大模型加速。
半结构化2:4稀疏性被现代加速器广泛支持,可提供高达2倍的理论加速比。然而,严格的50%稀疏性约束常导致后训练剪枝时显著精度下降。现有松弛稀疏格式要么需要专用编译器支持,要么引入运行时开销,限制端到端加速效果。本文提出Spense,一种实用的混合稀疏-密集格式,将每个权重矩阵划分为2:4稀疏区与密集区,放松有效稀疏度约束的同时,仍兼容现有的高性能稀疏与密集GEMM库,避免自定义编译器支持及输入激活扩展。基于此格式,我们设计SpenseGPT,一种一次性后训练剪枝方法,生成稀疏与密集区域。值得注意的是,密集区的选择至关重要,因此我们提出两种不同策略进行优化。在Qwen3-32B和Seed-OSS-36B模型上的实验表明,该方法在B200 GPU上使用FP8精度时,实现最高1.2倍端到端解码加速,同时保持模型精度。据我们所知,这是首个在B200等最新GPU上,通过半结构化稀疏张量核心实现真实场景下大模型解码加速的一次性剪枝工作,且不牺牲模型质量。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Semi-structured 2:4 sparsity is widely supported by modern accelerators, providing up to a 2x theoretical speedup. However, its strict 50% sparsity constraint often causes non-negligible accuracy degradation under post-training pruning. Meanwhile, existing relaxed sparsity formats either require specialized compiler support or introduce runtime overheads that limit end-to-end speedup. We propose Spense, a practical hybrid sparse-dense format that splits each weight matrix into a 2:4 sparse region and a dense region. This design relaxes the effective sparsity constraint while remaining compatible with existing high-performance sparse and dense GEMM libraries, avoiding both custom compiler support and input activation expansion. Building on this format, we introduce SpenseGPT, a one-shot post-training pruning method that produces sparse and dense regions. Notably, we show that selecting the right dense regions is important, and we devise two different strategies to choose them. Experiments on Qwen3-32B and Seed-OSS-36B demonstrate that our method achieves up to 1.2x end-to-end decoding speedup on B200 GPUs with FP8 precision, while preserving accuracy. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first one-shot pruning demonstration of real-world end-to-end LLM decoding speedup from semi-structured sparse tensor cores on recent GPUs such as B200s, while maintaining model quality.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。