Instruction-Following Pruning for Large Language Models

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2501.02086v2
• Date: Tue, 07 Jan 2025 22:03:04 GMT
• Title: Instruction-Following Pruning for Large Language Models
• Authors: Bairu Hou, Qibin Chen, Jianyu Wang, Guoli Yin, Chong Wang, Nan Du, Ruoming Pang, Shiyu Chang, Tao Lei,
• Abstract summary: We move beyond the traditional static pruning approach of determining a fixed pruning mask for a model. In our method, the pruning mask is input-dependent and adapts dynamically based on the information described in a user instruction. Our approach, termed "instruction-following pruning", introduces a sparse mask predictor that takes the user instruction as input and dynamically selects the most relevant model parameters for the given task.
• Score: 58.329978053711024
• License:
• Abstract: With the rapid scaling of large language models (LLMs), structured pruning has become a widely used technique to learn efficient, smaller models from larger ones, delivering superior performance compared to training similarly sized models from scratch. In this paper, we move beyond the traditional static pruning approach of determining a fixed pruning mask for a model, and propose a dynamic approach to structured pruning. In our method, the pruning mask is input-dependent and adapts dynamically based on the information described in a user instruction. Our approach, termed "instruction-following pruning", introduces a sparse mask predictor that takes the user instruction as input and dynamically selects the most relevant model parameters for the given task. To identify and activate effective parameters, we jointly optimize the sparse mask predictor and the LLM, leveraging both instruction-following data and the pre-training corpus. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on a wide range of evaluation benchmarks. For example, our 3B activated model improves over the 3B dense model by 5-8 points of absolute margin on domains such as math and coding, and rivals the performance of a 9B model.

Related papers

• SPaR: Self-Play with Tree-Search Refinement to Improve Instruction-Following in Large Language Models [88.29990536278167]
  We introduce SPaR, a self-play framework integrating tree-search self-refinement to yield valid and comparable preference pairs free from distractions. Our experiments show that a LLaMA3-8B model, trained over three iterations guided by SPaR, surpasses GPT-4-Turbo on the IFEval benchmark without losing general capabilities.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-12-16T09:47:43Z)
• Revisiting SMoE Language Models by Evaluating Inefficiencies with Task Specific Expert Pruning [78.72226641279863]
  Sparse Mixture of Expert (SMoE) models have emerged as a scalable alternative to dense models in language modeling. Our research explores task-specific model pruning to inform decisions about designing SMoE architectures. We introduce an adaptive task-aware pruning technique UNCURL to reduce the number of experts per MoE layer in an offline manner post-training.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-09-02T22:35:03Z)
• Evaluating Representations with Readout Model Switching [19.907607374144167]
  In this paper, we propose to use the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle to devise an evaluation metric. We design a hybrid discrete and continuous-valued model space for the readout models and employ a switching strategy to combine their predictions. The proposed metric can be efficiently computed with an online method and we present results for pre-trained vision encoders of various architectures.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-02-19T14:08:01Z)
• Towards a learning-based performance modeling for accelerating Deep Neural Networks [1.1549572298362785]
  We start an investigation of predictive models based on machine learning techniques in order to optimize Convolution Neural Networks (CNNs) Preliminary experiments on Midgard-based ARM Mali GPU show that our predictive model outperforms all the convolution operators manually selected by the library.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2022-12-09T18:28:07Z)
• Masked Autoencoding for Scalable and Generalizable Decision Making [93.84855114717062]
  MaskDP is a simple and scalable self-supervised pretraining method for reinforcement learning and behavioral cloning. We find that a MaskDP model gains the capability of zero-shot transfer to new BC tasks, such as single and multiple goal reaching.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2022-11-23T07:04:41Z)
• Model-Agnostic Multitask Fine-tuning for Few-shot Vision-Language Transfer Learning [59.38343286807997]
  We propose Model-Agnostic Multitask Fine-tuning (MAMF) for vision-language models on unseen tasks. Compared with model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML), MAMF discards the bi-level optimization and uses only first-order gradients. We show that MAMF consistently outperforms the classical fine-tuning method for few-shot transfer learning on five benchmark datasets.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2022-03-09T17:26:53Z)
• Gone Fishing: Neural Active Learning with Fisher Embeddings [55.08537975896764]
  There is an increasing need for active learning algorithms that are compatible with deep neural networks. This article introduces BAIT, a practical representation of tractable, and high-performing active learning algorithm for neural networks.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-06-17T17:26:31Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.