Title: Symmetric Pruning for Large Language Models
Primary area: foundation or frontier models, including LLMs
Keywords: post-training pruning, symmetric pruning, training-free fine-tuning

Abstract: Popular post-training pruning methods such as Wanda and RIA are known for their simple, yet effective, designs that have shown exceptional empirical performance. Wanda optimizes performance through calibrated activations during pruning, while RIA emphasizes the relative, rather than absolute, importance of weight elements. Despite their practical success, a thorough theoretical foundation explaining these outcomes has been lacking. This paper introduces new theoretical insights that redefine the standard minimization objective for pruning, offering a deeper understanding of the factors contributing to their success. Our study extends beyond these insights by proposing complementary strategies that consider both input activations and weight significance. We validate these approaches through rigorous experiments, demonstrating substantial enhancements over existing methods. Furthermore, we introduce a novel training-free fine-tuning approach R$^2$-DSnoT that incorporates relative weight importance and a regularized decision boundary within a dynamic pruning-and-growing framework, significantly outperforming strong baselines and establishing a new state of the art.

TL;DR: We provide a systematic theoretical analysis of post-training pruning methods and propose a symmetric pruning framework that improves large language model efficiency without additional training.