# TriSP: Tri-Signal Structured Pruning for Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.22587 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.22587/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jun 2026.

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

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Think you have Solved Question Answering? Try ARC, the AI2 Reasoning Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05457/) (2018)
- [HellaSwag: Can a Machine Really Finish Your Sentence?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07830/) (2019)
- [Mistral 7B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06825/) (2023)
- [PIQA: Reasoning about Physical Commonsense in Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11641/) (2019)
- [Can a Suit of Armor Conduct Electricity? A New Dataset for Open Book Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02789/) (2018)
- [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)
- [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)
- [DeepSeek LLM: Scaling Open-Source Language Models with Longtermism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02954/) (2024)
- [SliceGPT: Compress Large Language Models by Deleting Rows and Columns](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15024/) (2024)
- [ShortGPT: Layers in Large Language Models are More Redundant Than You Expect](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03853/) (2024)
- [Structured Pruning for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks: A survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00566/) (2023)
- [Fluctuation-based Adaptive Structured Pruning for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11983/) (2023)
- [LoRAPrune: Structured Pruning Meets Low-Rank Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18403/) (2023)
- [SlimGPT: Layer-wise Structured Pruning for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18110/) (2024)
- [Everybody Prune Now: Structured Pruning of LLMs with only Forward Passes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05406/) (2024)
- [BlockPruner: Fine-grained Pruning for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10594/) (2024)
- [Beyond Size: How Gradients Shape Pruning Decisions in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04902/) (2023)
- [Wanda++: Pruning Large Language Models via Regional Gradients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04992/) (2025)
- [Probe Pruning: Accelerating LLMs through Dynamic Pruning via Model-Probing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15618/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance across diverse tasks but their deployment is constrained by the memory and compute cost of their parameters. Structured pruning addresses this by removing entire structures such as attention heads and Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) neurons to produce smaller dense models that run efficiently on standard hardware. However, existing methods rely on either gradient-based importance estimation, which is memory-prohibitive, or activation-based statistical proxies, which do not directly measure the effect of removal on the loss. Furthermore, the interaction between the importance criterion and the post-pruning recovery strategy has not been systematically studied. We propose TriSP (Tri-Signal Structured Pruning), an importance metric that combines weight magnitude scaled by activation norm with first-order gradient sensitivity via a geometric mean, producing a channel-level score that captures both structural and loss-sensitivity signals. Combined with adaptive per-layer budget allocation and low-rank adaptation (LoRA) recovery, TriSP achieves the lowest perplexity and highest zero-shot accuracy across all tested configurations, reaching 6.80 WikiText-2 perplexity at 20% pruning on LLaMA-7B. Inference throughput improves by 82% at 50% pruning, while still maintaining competitive performance.