Deterministic Differentiable Structured Pruning for Large Language Models
Structured pruning reduces LLM inference cost by removing low-importance architectural components. This can be viewed as learning a multiplicative gate for each component under an l0 sparsity constraint. Due to the discreteness of the l0 norm, prior work typically adopts stochastic hard-concrete relaxations to enable differentiable optimization; however, this stochasticity can introduce a train--test mismatch when sampled masks are discretized for deployment and restricts masks to a bounded, near-binary range. To address this, we propose Deterministic Differentiable Pruning (DDP), a mask-only optimization method that eliminates stochasticity by directly optimizing a deterministic soft sur...
| Authors | Weiyu Huang, Pengle Zhang, Xiaolu Zhang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 9 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 11 May 2026 |
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