Model Pruning: Compressing LLMs
When to Use This Skill
Use Model Pruning when you need to:
- Reduce model size by 40-60% with <1% accuracy loss
- Accelerate inference using hardware-friendly sparsity (2-4× speedup)
- Deploy on constrained hardware (mobile, edge devices)
- Compress without retraining using one-shot methods
- Enable efficient serving with reduced memory footprint
Key Techniques: Wanda (weights × activations), SparseGPT (second-order), structured pruning, N:M sparsity
Papers: Wanda ICLR 2024 (arXiv 2306.11695), SparseGPT (arXiv 2301.00774)
Installation
Quick Start
Wanda Pruning (One-Shot, No Retraining)
Source: ICLR 2024 (arXiv 2306.11695)
SparseGPT (Second-Order Pruning)
Source: arXiv 2301.00774
N:M Structured Pruning (Hardware Accelerator)
Core Concepts
1. Pruning Criteria
Magnitude Pruning (baseline):
Wanda (weights × activations):
SparseGPT (second-order):
2. Structured vs Unstructured
Unstructured (fine-grained):
- Prune individual weights
- Higher quality (better accuracy)
- No hardware speedup (irregular sparsity)
Structured (coarse-grained):
- Prune entire neurons, heads, or layers
- Lower quality (more accuracy loss)
- Hardware speedup (regular sparsity)
Semi-structured (N:M):
- Best of both worlds
- 50% sparsity (2:4) → 2× speedup on NVIDIA GPUs
- Minimal accuracy loss
3. Sparsity Patterns
Pruning Strategies
Strategy 1: Gradual Magnitude Pruning
Strategy 2: Layer-wise Pruning
Strategy 3: Iterative Pruning + Fine-tuning
Production Deployment
Complete Pruning Pipeline
Evaluation
Best Practices
1. Sparsity Selection
2. Method Selection
3. Avoid Common Pitfalls
Performance Comparison
Pruning methods at 50% sparsity (LLaMA-7B):
Source: Wanda paper (ICLR 2024), SparseGPT paper
Resources
- Wanda Paper (ICLR 2024): https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.11695
- Wanda GitHub: https://github.com/locuslab/wanda
- SparseGPT Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.00774
- SparseGPT GitHub: https://github.com/IST-DASLab/sparsegpt
- NVIDIA Sparse Tensor Cores: https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/accelerating-inference-with-sparsity-using-ampere-and-tensorrt/


