Structured Optimal Brain Pruning for Large Language Models

Jiateng Wei, Quan Lu, Ning Jiang, Siqi Li, Jingyang Xiang, Jun Chen, Yong Liu

Abstract: The massive parameters and computational demands hinder the widespread application of Large Language Models (LLMs). Network pruning provides a practical solution to this problem. However, existing pruning works for LLMs mainly focus on unstructured pruning or necessitate post-pruning fine-tuning. The former relies on special hardware to accelerate computation, while the latter may need substantial computational resources. In this paper, we introduce a retraining-free structured pruning method called SoBP (Structured Optimal Brain Pruning). It leverages global first-order information to select pruning structures, then refines them with a local greedy approach, and finally adopts module-wise reconstruction to mitigate information loss. We assess the effectiveness of SoBP across 14 models from 3 LLM families on 8 distinct datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that SoBP outperforms current state-of-the-art methods.