Large language models (LLM) are notoriously huge and expensive to work with. An LLM requires a lot of specialized hardware to train and manipulate. We’ve seen efforts to transform and quantize the models that result in smaller footprints and models that run more readily on commodity software but at the cost of performance. Now we’re seeing efforts to make the models smaller but still perform as well as the full model.
This paper, A Simple and Effective Pruning Approach for Large Language Models, introduces us to Wanda (Pruning by Weights and activations). Here’s the synopsis:
As their size increases, Large Languages Models (LLMs) are natural candidates for network pruning methods: approaches that drop a subset of network weights while striving to preserve performance. Existing methods, however, require either retraining, which is rarely affordable for billion-scale LLMs, or solving a weight reconstruction problem reliant on second-order information, which may also be computationally expensive.