Exploring Federated Pruning for Large Language Models
Authors: name: Pengxin Guo; name: Yinong Wang; name: Wei Li; name: Mengting Liu; name: Ming Li; name: Jinkai Zheng; name: Liangqiong Qu
Published: 2025-05-19 03:41:54

Abstract: LLM pruning has emerged as a promising technology for compressing LLMs,
enabling their deployment on resource-limited devices. However, current
methodologies typically require access to public calibration samples, which can
be challenging to obtain in privacy-sensitive domains. To address this issue,
we introduce FedPrLLM, a comprehensive federated pruning framework designed for
the privacy-preserving compression of LLMs. In FedPrLLM, each client only needs
to calculate a pruning mask matrix based on its local calibration data and
share it with the server to prune the global model. This approach allows for
collaborative pruning of the global model with the knowledge of each client
while maintaining local data privacy. Additionally, we conduct extensive
experiments to explore various possibilities within the FedPrLLM framework,
including different comparison groups, pruning strategies, and the decision to
scale weights. Our extensive evaluation reveals that one-shot pruning with
layer comparison and no weight scaling is the optimal choice within the
FedPrLLM framework. We hope our work will help guide future efforts in pruning
LLMs in privacy-sensitive fields. Our code is available at
https://github.com/Pengxin-Guo/FedPrLLM.