# Pruning Large Language Models via Accuracy Predictor

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.09507 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09507/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14314/) (2023)
- [Pointer Sentinel Mixture Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.07843/) (2016)
- [GPTQ: Accurate Post-Training Quantization for Generative Pre-trained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.17323/) (2022)
- [SparseGPT: Massive Language Models Can Be Accurately Pruned in One-Shot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00774/) (2023)
- [Aligning Books and Movies: Towards Story-like Visual Explanations by Watching Movies and Reading Books](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.06724/) (2015)
- [A Simple and Effective Pruning Approach for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11695/) (2023)
- [LLM-Pruner: On the Structural Pruning of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11627/) (2023)
- [Importance Estimation for Neural Network Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.10771/) (2019)
- [Explainability for Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01029/) (2023)
- [Neural Architecture Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.07233/) (2018)
- [Structured Pruning for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks: A survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00566/) (2023)
- [NORM: Knowledge Distillation via N-to-One Representation Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13803/) (2023)
- [Norm Tweaking: High-performance Low-bit Quantization of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.02784/) (2023)
- [DisWOT: Student Architecture Search for Distillation WithOut Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15678/) (2023)
- [EMQ: Evolving Training-free Proxies for Automated Mixed Precision Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10554/) (2023)
- [Prior-Guided One-shot Neural Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13329/) (2022)
- [GP-NAS-ensemble: a model for NAS Performance Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.09231/) (2023)
- [RD-NAS: Enhancing One-shot Supernet Ranking Ability via Ranking Distillation from Zero-cost Proxies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.09850/) (2023)
- [Accuracy Prediction with Non-neural Model for Neural Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.04785/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Model Compression and Efficient Inference for Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09748/) (2024)
- [Compressing LLMs: The Truth is Rarely Pure and Never Simple](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01382/) (2023)
- [SiDA-MoE: Sparsity-Inspired Data-Aware Serving for Efficient and Scalable Large Mixture-of-Experts Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18859/) (2023)
- [Deploying Foundation Model Powered Agent Services: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13437/) (2024)
- [Adaptive Pruning for Large Language Models with Structural Importance Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15127/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models(LLMs) containing tens of billions of parameters (or even more) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in various NLP tasks. However, substantial model size poses challenges to training, inference, and deployment so that it is necessary to compress the model. At present, most model compression for LLMs requires manual design of pruning features, which has problems such as complex optimization pipeline and difficulty in retaining the capabilities of certain parts of the model.Therefore, we propose a novel pruning approach: firstly, a training set of a certain number of architecture-accuracy pairs is established, and then a non-neural model is trained as an accuracy predictor. Using the accuracy predictor to further optimize the search space and search, the optimal model can be automatically selected. Experiments show that our proposed approach is effective and efficient. Compared with the baseline, the perplexity(PPL) on Wikitext2 and PTB dropped by 9.48% and 5,76% respectively, and the average accuracy of MMLU increased by 6.28%.
