@inproceedings{zhao-etal-2025-fistapruner,
title = "{FISTAP}runer: Layer-wise Post-training Pruning for Large Language Models",
author = "Zhao, Pengxiang and
Hu, Hanyu and
Li, Ping and
Zheng, Yi and
Wang, Zhefeng and
Yuan, Xiaoming",
editor = "Christodoulopoulos, Christos and
Chakraborty, Tanmoy and
Rose, Carolyn and
Peng, Violet",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
month = nov,
year = "2025",
address = "Suzhou, China",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.1498/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.emnlp-main.1498",
pages = "29469--29487",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-332-6",
abstract = "Pruning is a critical strategy for compressing trained large language models (LLMs), aiming at substantial memory conservation and computational acceleration without compromising performance. However, existing pruning methods typically necessitate inefficient retraining for billion-scale LLMs or rely on heuristically designed metrics to determine pruning masks, leading to performance degradation. This paper presents, for the first time, a LASSO-like convex optimization model crafted to induce sparsity in LLMs. By leveraging FISTA, we introduce FISTAPruner, a novel method that includes a cumulative error elimination mechanism within decoder layers and supports parallel pruning for unstructured pruning. Additionally, we extend this method to 2:4 semi-structured pruning. We comprehensively evaluate FISTAPruner on models such as OPT, LLaMA, and Qwen variants with 125M to 70B parameters under unstructured and 2:4 semi-structured sparsity, showcasing superior performance over existing methods across various language benchmarks. Notably, it can remove 50{\%} of the model parameters for LLaMA-3-70B while retaining 98.6{\%} and 95.6{\%} of the zero-shot task performance under these two sparsity patterns, respectively."
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<abstract>Pruning is a critical strategy for compressing trained large language models (LLMs), aiming at substantial memory conservation and computational acceleration without compromising performance. However, existing pruning methods typically necessitate inefficient retraining for billion-scale LLMs or rely on heuristically designed metrics to determine pruning masks, leading to performance degradation. This paper presents, for the first time, a LASSO-like convex optimization model crafted to induce sparsity in LLMs. By leveraging FISTA, we introduce FISTAPruner, a novel method that includes a cumulative error elimination mechanism within decoder layers and supports parallel pruning for unstructured pruning. Additionally, we extend this method to 2:4 semi-structured pruning. We comprehensively evaluate FISTAPruner on models such as OPT, LLaMA, and Qwen variants with 125M to 70B parameters under unstructured and 2:4 semi-structured sparsity, showcasing superior performance over existing methods across various language benchmarks. Notably, it can remove 50% of the model parameters for LLaMA-3-70B while retaining 98.6% and 95.6% of the zero-shot task performance under these two sparsity patterns, respectively.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T FISTAPruner: Layer-wise Post-training Pruning for Large Language Models
%A Zhao, Pengxiang
%A Hu, Hanyu
%A Li, Ping
%A Zheng, Yi
%A Wang, Zhefeng
%A Yuan, Xiaoming
%Y Christodoulopoulos, Christos
%Y Chakraborty, Tanmoy
%Y Rose, Carolyn
%Y Peng, Violet
%S Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
%D 2025
%8 November
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Suzhou, China
%@ 979-8-89176-332-6
%F zhao-etal-2025-fistapruner
%X Pruning is a critical strategy for compressing trained large language models (LLMs), aiming at substantial memory conservation and computational acceleration without compromising performance. However, existing pruning methods typically necessitate inefficient retraining for billion-scale LLMs or rely on heuristically designed metrics to determine pruning masks, leading to performance degradation. This paper presents, for the first time, a LASSO-like convex optimization model crafted to induce sparsity in LLMs. By leveraging FISTA, we introduce FISTAPruner, a novel method that includes a cumulative error elimination mechanism within decoder layers and supports parallel pruning for unstructured pruning. Additionally, we extend this method to 2:4 semi-structured pruning. We comprehensively evaluate FISTAPruner on models such as OPT, LLaMA, and Qwen variants with 125M to 70B parameters under unstructured and 2:4 semi-structured sparsity, showcasing superior performance over existing methods across various language benchmarks. Notably, it can remove 50% of the model parameters for LLaMA-3-70B while retaining 98.6% and 95.6% of the zero-shot task performance under these two sparsity patterns, respectively.
%R 10.18653/v1/2025.emnlp-main.1498
%U https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.1498/
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.emnlp-main.1498
%P 29469-29487
Markdown (Informal)
[FISTAPruner: Layer-wise Post-training Pruning for Large Language Models](https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.1498/) (Zhao et al., EMNLP 2025)
ACL