PruneShift: A Framework for Evaluating Decision Reliability in Structured Pruning

Structured pruning uses surrogate objectives because direct task evaluation over every feasible mask is too expensive. Most evaluations report average surrogate error or rank correlation on broadly sampled masks. These summaries do not directly test the mask chosen by the surrogate. We introduce PruneShift, an evaluation framework that separates broad predictive fidelity, fidelity near selector outputs, and the quality of the selected pruning decision. We first prove that Spearman and Kendall agreement can approach one while normalized selection regret remains maximal. We then derive sufficient conditions based on uniform error, selector suboptimality, decision margin, density ratio, and comparison mass. The analysis also yields a finite pool certificate with an explicit excess cost bound. Four studies test different links in this argument. External TextbookQA confirmation is heterogeneous: 7 of 20 simultaneous intervals favor the surrogate-selected mask, 6 favor its fixed comparator, and 7 cross zero. On a fixed Natural Questions pool, strict improvement holds in one of four settings. A controlled QQP experiment supports the proposed coverage mechanism in all 16 prespecified endpoints, although the sufficient bounds are conservative. Finally, a restricted OSSCAR reconstruction study on OPT-125M shows better local than broad fidelity in 68 of 75 primary endpoints. Independent fixed-mask confirmation is inconclusive in 24 of 25 endpoints and favors the comparator in one. These results show why predictive fit, decision reliability, and pruning method quality require separate evidence.