# Denoised Variance-Based Pruning with Optimal Brain Bias Compensation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17657 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.17657/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Qwen2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15115/) (2024)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Pointer Sentinel Mixture Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.07843/) (2016)
- [Learning both Weights and Connections for Efficient Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02626/) (2015)
- [Searching for MobileNetV3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02244/) (2019)
- [GPTQ: Accurate Post-Training Quantization for Generative Pre-trained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.17323/) (2022)
- [Pruning Filters for Efficient ConvNets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.08710/) (2016)
- [SparseGPT: Massive Language Models Can Be Accurately Pruned in One-Shot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00774/) (2023)
- [SNIP: Single-shot Network Pruning based on Connection Sensitivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02340/) (2018)
- [LLM-Pruner: On the Structural Pruning of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11627/) (2023)
- [QuaRot: Outlier-Free 4-Bit Inference in Rotated LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00456/) (2024)
- [Sparsity in Deep Learning: Pruning and growth for efficient inference and training in neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.00554/) (2021)
- [Pruning neural networks without any data by iteratively conserving synaptic flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05467/) (2020)
- [The State of Sparsity in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09574/) (2019)
- [Optimal Brain Compression: A Framework for Accurate Post-Training Quantization and Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.11580/) (2022)
- [Global Vision Transformer Pruning with Hessian-Aware Saliency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04869/) (2021)
- [X-Pruner: eXplainable Pruning for Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04935/) (2023)
- [Vision Transformer Slimming: Multi-Dimension Searching in Continuous Optimization Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.00814/) (2022)
- [An Entropy-based Pruning Method for CNN Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05791/) (2017)
- [OBS-Diff: Accurate Pruning For Diffusion Models in One-Shot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06751/) (2025)
- [A Comprehensive Performance Study of Large Language Models on Novel AI Accelerators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04607/) (2023)
- [Variance-Based Pruning for Accelerating and Compressing Trained Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12988/) (2025)
- [The Unseen Frontier: Pushing the Limits of LLM Sparsity with Surrogate-Free ADMM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.01650/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision Transformers (ViTs) achieve state-of-the-art performance but carry massive computational overhead that restricts edge deployment. Although structural pruning has emerged as a key strategy to reduce these costs, existing methods often suffer from severe accuracy degradation or require expensive retraining. Recently, Variance-Based Pruning (VBP) introduced a promising paradigm by selecting neurons based on activation variance; however, it remains limited by statistical noise in finite-sample activation covariance and reliance on bias-only updates that cannot fully account for structural reconstruction error. To address these limitations, we introduce Denoised Variance-Based Pruning with Optimal Brain Bias Compensation (DVBP + OB2C). We leverage random matrix theory to filter noise from the activation covariance spectrum for robust neuron selection and mathematically prove that integrating mean-shift compensation into the Optimal Brain Compression objective reduces the layer-wise Hessian exactly to the activation covariance matrix. This enables an optimal, closed-form update of the remaining weights using the same statistics gathered for selection. Extensive experiments on DeiT, Swin, and ConvNeXt architectures demonstrate that DVBP + OB2C achieves state-of-the-art training-free performance; at 50% MLP pruning, it retains over 90% of the original Top-1 accuracy on Small and Base variants, outperforming VBP by up to 29.46% (ConvNeXt-T) and 7.33% (Swin-S). The code is available at: https://github.com/geontackee/DVBPOB2C.