DuoGPT: Training-free Dual Sparsity through Activation-aware Pruning in LLMs
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Abstract (arXiv)
Large language models (LLMs) deliver strong performance but are difficult to deploy due to high memory and compute costs. While pruning reduces these demands, most methods ignore activation sparsity observed at runtime. We reinterpret activation sparsity as dynamic structured weight sparsity and propose DuoGPT, a unified framework that constructs dual-sparse (spMspV) workloads by combining unstructured weight pruning with activation sparsity. To preserve accuracy, we extend the Optimal Brain Compression (OBC) framework with activation-aware calibration and introduce output residuals from the dense model as correction terms. We further optimize the solution for efficient GPU execution, enabling scalability to billion-parameter LLMs. Evaluations on LLaMA-2 and LLaMA-3 show that DuoGPT outperforms state-of-the-art structured pruning methods by up to 9.17% accuracy at an iso-speedup of 1.39× compared to the baseline dense model. Code is available at Github.
Key facts. Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 42 of its 49 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 25 Jun 2025.
Builds on
42 of 49 references.
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30 more
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2025: 1; 2026: 5.
6 papers.
- 2025GLASS: Global-Local Aggregation for Inference-time Sparsification of LLMscited by 1
- 2026Unified Static-Dynamic Pruning for Efficient LLM Inferencecited by 0
- 2026At-the-Roofline Sparse Tensor Contractions on Vector Processors for Transformer Inferencecited by 0
- 2026Celty: SpMSpV GPU Kernel and SIMT Co-Design for Efficient Dual-Sparse LLM Inferencecited by 0
- 2026LaMoC: Loss-Aware Modular Compression for LLMscited by 0
- 2026Where Activation Sparsity and KV-Cache Sparsity Cross in LLM Decodingcited by 0
- 2026Where Activation Sparsity and KV-Cache Sparsity Cross in LLM Decoding27 Sep 2026
- 2026LaMoC: Loss-Aware Modular Compression for LLMs31 Aug 2026
- 2026Celty: SpMSpV GPU Kernel and SIMT Co-Design for Efficient Dual-Sparse LLM Inference2 Aug 2026
- 2026At-the-Roofline Sparse Tensor Contractions on Vector Processors for Transformer Inference28 Jul 2026
- 2026Unified Static-Dynamic Pruning for Efficient LLM Inference24 Jul 2026
- 2025GLASS: Global-Local Aggregation for Inference-time Sparsification of LLMs19 Aug 2025