# EfficientXpert: Efficient Domain Adaptation for Large Language Models via Propagation-Aware Pruning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19935 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19935/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [Deep Compression: Compressing Deep Neural Networks with Pruning, Trained Quantization and Huffman Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.00149/) (2015)
- [Large Language Models Encode Clinical Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.13138/) (2022)
- [PubMedQA: A Dataset for Biomedical Research Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06146/) (2019)
- [PaLM 2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10403/) (2023)
- [SparseGPT: Massive Language Models Can Be Accurately Pruned in One-Shot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00774/) (2023)
- [A Simple and Effective Pruning Approach for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11695/) (2023)
- [AlpacaFarm: A Simulation Framework for Methods that Learn from Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14387/) (2023)
- [FinGPT: Open-Source Financial Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06031/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Deep Neural Network Pruning-Taxonomy, Comparison, Analysis, and Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06767/) (2023)
- [When Does Pretraining Help? Assessing Self-Supervised Learning for Law and the CaseHOLD Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08671/) (2021)
- [Lessons from Natural Language Inference in the Clinical Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06752/) (2018)
- [ContractNLI: A Dataset for Document-level Natural Language Inference for Contracts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01799/) (2021)
- [BillSum: A Corpus for Automatic Summarization of US Legislation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.00523/) (2019)
- [Lookahead: A Far-Sighted Alternative of Magnitude-based Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.04809/) (2020)
- [MultiLegalPile: A 689GB Multilingual Legal Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02069/) (2023)
- [On the Impact of Calibration Data in Post-training Quantization and Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09755/) (2023)
- [LoRAPrune: Structured Pruning Meets Low-Rank Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18403/) (2023)
- [Injecting Domain-Specific Knowledge into Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10708/) (2025)
- [LawGPT: A Chinese Legal Knowledge-Enhanced Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04614/) (2024)
- [Is C4 Dataset Optimal for Pruning? An Investigation of Calibration Data for LLM Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07461/) (2024)
- [Beware of Calibration Data for Pruning Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17711/) (2024)
- [Pruning as a Domain-specific LLM Extractor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06275/) (2024)
- [Investigating Calibration and Corruption Robustness of Post-hoc Pruned Perception CNNs: An Image Classification Benchmark Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20876/) (2024)
- [All-in-One Tuning and Structural Pruning for Domain-Specific LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14426/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [EvoSpec: Evolving Speculative Decoding via Real-Time Vocabulary and Parameter Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.27390/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deploying domain-specialized large language models on resource-constrained hardware motivates reducing both adaptation cost and the number of retained weights. LoRA lowers adaptation cost but leaves a dense backbone, while separate pruning can discard weights that become important during adaptation. We propose EfficientXpert, a framework that co-adapts low-rank updates and sparse support. Its ForeSight Mask scores weights through a downstream reconstruction surrogate using the evolving LoRA-augmented weights; Partial Brain Surgeon (PBS) realigns the adapter through a closed-form correction. At 40% sparsity, the strongest variant retains 98.55--108.99% of dense-LoRA aggregate performance across the evaluated LLaMA settings. On Qwen3-8B, adaptation adds 17.9--27.0% training time and at most 4.8% peak GPU memory. Our analysis connects the domain- and rank-dependent effects of PBS to its constrained reconstruction objective, providing guidance for selecting adapter recovery capacity. Together, these results demonstrate efficient production of sparse, domain-specialized experts. Code is available at https://github.com/TagoreZhao/Efficient_Domain_Adaptation.