@inproceedings{xing-etal-2026-efficientllm,
title = "{E}fficient{LLM}: Unified Pruning-Aware Pretraining for Auto-Designed Compact Language Models",
author = "Xing, Xingrun and
Liu, Zheng and
Xiao, Shitao and
Gao, Boyan and
Liang, Yiming and
Lin, Haokun and
Zeng, Xianlin and
Li, Guoqi and
Zhang, Jiajun",
editor = "Liakata, Maria and
Moreira, Viviane P. and
Zhang, Jiajun and
Jurgens, David",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jul,
year = "2026",
address = "San Diego, California, United States",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.355/",
pages = "7813--7830",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
abstract = "Modern large language models (LLMs) driven by scaling laws achieve emergent intelligence in large model sizes. Recently, the increasing concerns about cloud costs, latency and privacy make it an urgent requirement to develop compact edge language models. Distinguished from direct pretraining that bounded by parameter scaling law, this work proposes the unified pruning-aware pretraining, focusing on pretraining compact models while preserving performance of much larger source models, termed EfficientLLM. It features following characteristics: 1) Pruning in Pretraining Corpus: we introduce minimal parameter groups to decouple LLMs and continuously optimize model architecture with classic pruning methods like LLM-Pruner and SparseGPT during pretraining. We reveal that it achieves top-quality compact language models to scale up LLM pruning to large scale pretraining. 2) Auto-Designed Architecture: the LLM architecture is auto-designed during saliency-driven pruning, unifying pretraining, architectural design, and parameter pruning into a single process. Based on these, EfficientLLM significantly outperforms directly pretrained baselines with $100M \sim 1B$ parameters, such as MobileLLM, SmolLM, Qwen2.5-0.5B, OLMo-1B, Llama3.2-1B in commen sense benchmarks, which bridges the performance gap between traditional LLM compression and direct pretraining. We open source on https://github.com/Xingrun-Xing2/EfficientLLM."
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<abstract>Modern large language models (LLMs) driven by scaling laws achieve emergent intelligence in large model sizes. Recently, the increasing concerns about cloud costs, latency and privacy make it an urgent requirement to develop compact edge language models. Distinguished from direct pretraining that bounded by parameter scaling law, this work proposes the unified pruning-aware pretraining, focusing on pretraining compact models while preserving performance of much larger source models, termed EfficientLLM. It features following characteristics: 1) Pruning in Pretraining Corpus: we introduce minimal parameter groups to decouple LLMs and continuously optimize model architecture with classic pruning methods like LLM-Pruner and SparseGPT during pretraining. We reveal that it achieves top-quality compact language models to scale up LLM pruning to large scale pretraining. 2) Auto-Designed Architecture: the LLM architecture is auto-designed during saliency-driven pruning, unifying pretraining, architectural design, and parameter pruning into a single process. Based on these, EfficientLLM significantly outperforms directly pretrained baselines with 100M \sim 1B parameters, such as MobileLLM, SmolLM, Qwen2.5-0.5B, OLMo-1B, Llama3.2-1B in commen sense benchmarks, which bridges the performance gap between traditional LLM compression and direct pretraining. We open source on https://github.com/Xingrun-Xing2/EfficientLLM.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T EfficientLLM: Unified Pruning-Aware Pretraining for Auto-Designed Compact Language Models
%A Xing, Xingrun
%A Liu, Zheng
%A Xiao, Shitao
%A Gao, Boyan
%A Liang, Yiming
%A Lin, Haokun
%A Zeng, Xianlin
%A Li, Guoqi
%A Zhang, Jiajun
%Y Liakata, Maria
%Y Moreira, Viviane P.
%Y Zhang, Jiajun
%Y Jurgens, David
%S Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, California, United States
%@ 979-8-89176-390-6
%F xing-etal-2026-efficientllm
%X Modern large language models (LLMs) driven by scaling laws achieve emergent intelligence in large model sizes. Recently, the increasing concerns about cloud costs, latency and privacy make it an urgent requirement to develop compact edge language models. Distinguished from direct pretraining that bounded by parameter scaling law, this work proposes the unified pruning-aware pretraining, focusing on pretraining compact models while preserving performance of much larger source models, termed EfficientLLM. It features following characteristics: 1) Pruning in Pretraining Corpus: we introduce minimal parameter groups to decouple LLMs and continuously optimize model architecture with classic pruning methods like LLM-Pruner and SparseGPT during pretraining. We reveal that it achieves top-quality compact language models to scale up LLM pruning to large scale pretraining. 2) Auto-Designed Architecture: the LLM architecture is auto-designed during saliency-driven pruning, unifying pretraining, architectural design, and parameter pruning into a single process. Based on these, EfficientLLM significantly outperforms directly pretrained baselines with 100M \sim 1B parameters, such as MobileLLM, SmolLM, Qwen2.5-0.5B, OLMo-1B, Llama3.2-1B in commen sense benchmarks, which bridges the performance gap between traditional LLM compression and direct pretraining. We open source on https://github.com/Xingrun-Xing2/EfficientLLM.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.355/
%P 7813-7830
Markdown (Informal)
[EfficientLLM: Unified Pruning-Aware Pretraining for Auto-Designed Compact Language Models](https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.355/) (Xing et al., ACL 2026)
ACL
- Xingrun Xing, Zheng Liu, Shitao Xiao, Boyan Gao, Yiming Liang, Haokun Lin, Xianlin Zeng, Guoqi Li, and Jiajun Zhang. 2026. EfficientLLM: Unified Pruning-Aware Pretraining for Auto-Designed Compact Language Models. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 7813–7830, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.