arXiv:2608.06630cs.LG2026-08

通过保留输出差异提升大模型剪枝效果,显著降低推理成本。

The Sparsity Whisperer

  • 基于输入差异构建剪枝准则,关注神经元对相似输入的区分能力。
  • 第二阶方法在7B至405B模型上优于现有基线,结构化剪枝下仍有效。
  • 可与RIA、ALPS等方法结合,实现精度与速度的双重提升。

剪枝能降低大语言模型的推理开销,但现有方法主要依赖保留大激活或重建层输出。本文指出,这忽略了多层感知机中特别敏感于稀疏性的神经元所执行的关键计算:将相似输入区分为不同输出。因此,有效的剪枝应不仅保留激活值,更需保留输出间的差异性。为此提出一类差异感知剪枝方法。Wisp为一阶、无需更新的方法,使用输入差异范数评分权重;Wisp+通过每个神经元最强烈分离的输入对进行神经元级优化;Whisper为二阶方法,采用轻度正则化的差异海森矩阵作为重建目标。在7B至405B参数的Llama 2和3.1模型上,二阶变体持续优于强重建基线,而无需更新的变体在受限条件下超越激活感知基线。改进效果扩展至结构化剪枝、下游任务评估及其它模型族。将本方法融入RIA和ALPS等更强技术中,可进一步提升性能,在几乎无额外成本下推动精度-运行时间前沿。结果表明,保留输出差异是后训练大模型稀疏化中广泛适用且可组合的重要信号。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Pruning reduces the inference cost of large language models, but existing criteria primarily preserve large activations or reconstruct layer outputs. We argue that this overlooks a key computation performed by particularly sparsity-sensitive neurons in the MLP up and gate projections: separating similar inputs into dissimilar outputs. This suggests that effective pruning should preserve not only activations, but also the differences between outputs more broadly. We introduce a family of difference-informed pruning methods built upon this principle. Wisp is a first-order, update-free method that scores weights using input-difference norms, and Wisp+ refines this score neuronwise using the input pairs each neuron separates most strongly. Finally, Whisper is a second-order method that uses a lightly regularized difference Hessian as its reconstruction objective. Across Llama 2 and 3.1 models from 7B to 405B parameters, our second-order variant consistently improves over strong reconstruction-based baselines, while our update-free variants improve over activation-aware baselines, especially in constrained settings. The improvements over Wanda and SparseGPT extend to structured sparsity, downstream evaluations, and other model families. Augmenting stronger techniques such as RIA and ALPS with our difference-informed criteria yields further improvements, shifting the overall accuracy-runtime frontier outward at negligible additional cost. These results suggest that preserving output differences is a broadly useful and composable signal for post-training LLM sparsification.

模型剪枝稀疏性大模型优化输出差异

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