James Seale Smith
2025
FlexiGPT: Pruning and Extending Large Language Models with Low-Rank Weight Sharing
James Seale Smith
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Chi-Heng Lin
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Shikhar Tuli
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Haris Jeelani
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Shangqian Gao
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Yilin Shen
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Hongxia Jin
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Yen-Chang Hsu
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
The rapid proliferation of large language models (LLMs) in natural language processing (NLP) has created a critical need for techniques that enable efficient deployment on memory-constrained devices without compromising performance. We present a method to prune LLMs that selectively prunes model blocks based on an importance score and replaces them with a low-parameter replacement strategy. Specifically, we propose a principled metric to replace each pruned block using a weight-sharing mechanism that leverages unpruned counterparts from the model and block-specific low-rank adapters. Furthermore, we facilitate the learning of these replacement blocks with output feature normalization and an adapter initialization scheme built on low-rank SVD reconstructions. Empirical evaluations demonstrate substantial performance gains over existing methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance on 5/6 benchmarks for a compression rate of 30% and 6/6 benchmarks for a compression rate of 40%. We also demonstrate that our approach can extend smaller models, boosting performance on 6/6 benchmarks using only ~0.3% tokens of extended training with minimal additional parameter costs.
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Co-authors
- Shangqian Gao 1
- Yen-Chang Hsu 1
- Haris Jeelani 1
- Hongxia Jin 1
- Chi-Heng Lin 1
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