Improved Methods for Model Pruning

Authors: Wei Jiang, Anying Fu, Youling Zhang
Primary area: optimization
Keywords: model pruning, optimization, alignment, attention

Abstract:
Model pruning is a performance optimization technique for large language and vision models. However, existing pruning methods often lead to significant performance degradation or require extensive retraining and fine-tuning. This technique aims to identify and remove neurons, connections unlikely leading to the contribution during the machine generation phase. Our goal is to obtain a much smaller and faster foundational model that can quickly generate content almost as good as those of the unpruned models. We propose MAMA (short for Movement and Magnitude Analysis), an improved pruning method that effectively reduces model size and network computational complexity while maintaining performance comparable to the original unpruned model even at extreme pruned levels. The improved method is based on weights, bias, activations and proposed novel pruning indicators. Empirical results show that our method outperforms and be comparable to state-of-the-art methods across various pruning levels. All our code, models, dataset, and demo are publicly available.

Decision: desk reject

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