@inproceedings{sun-etal-2026-dual-activation,
title = "Dual Activation-Weight Sparsity: A Training-Free Framework for Efficient Large Language Model Compression",
author = "Sun, Luoyang and
Li, Guangyan and
Deng, Cheng and
Zhang, Haifeng and
Zhao, Jian and
Tang, Yongqiang and
Zhang, Wensheng and
Wang, Jun",
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.378/",
pages = "8350--8366",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
abstract = "Large language models (LLMs) excel at natural language tasks but face deployment challenges due to computational demands. We introduce \textbf{Dual Activation-Weight Sparsity (DAWS)}, a training-free framework that jointly exploits activation and weight sparsity through magnitude-based routing. Systematic analysis of pretrained transformers reveals two key observations: (1) the activation energy is concentrated in a few neurons, and (2) activation and weight sparsity patterns are complementary between attention and FFN layers. DAWS employs a three-tier routing strategy: high-magnitude activations pass through full-precision weights to preserve critical pathways, medium-magnitude activations use magnitude-pruned sparse weights for efficiency, and low-magnitude activations are directly discarded. Unlike prior work that uses activation-aware pruning methods like WANDA, our approach uses direct magnitude-based pruning, which we show is more robust to sample-level variations. Experiments on Llama and Mistral models demonstrate that DAWS maintains {\ensuremath{>}}98{\%} of dense model performance at 50{\%} sparsity, outperforming WANDA, TEAL, and R-Sparse."
}<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<modsCollection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">
<mods ID="sun-etal-2026-dual-activation">
<titleInfo>
<title>Dual Activation-Weight Sparsity: A Training-Free Framework for Efficient Large Language Model Compression</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Luoyang</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Sun</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Guangyan</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Li</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Cheng</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Deng</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Haifeng</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Zhang</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Jian</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Zhao</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Yongqiang</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Tang</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Wensheng</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Zhang</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Jun</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Wang</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<dateIssued>2026-07</dateIssued>
</originInfo>
<typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource>
<relatedItem type="host">
<titleInfo>
<title>Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Maria</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Liakata</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Viviane</namePart>
<namePart type="given">P</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Moreira</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Jiajun</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Zhang</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">David</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Jurgens</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<publisher>Association for Computational Linguistics</publisher>
<place>
<placeTerm type="text">San Diego, California, United States</placeTerm>
</place>
</originInfo>
<genre authority="marcgt">conference publication</genre>
<identifier type="isbn">979-8-89176-390-6</identifier>
</relatedItem>
<abstract>Large language models (LLMs) excel at natural language tasks but face deployment challenges due to computational demands. We introduce Dual Activation-Weight Sparsity (DAWS), a training-free framework that jointly exploits activation and weight sparsity through magnitude-based routing. Systematic analysis of pretrained transformers reveals two key observations: (1) the activation energy is concentrated in a few neurons, and (2) activation and weight sparsity patterns are complementary between attention and FFN layers. DAWS employs a three-tier routing strategy: high-magnitude activations pass through full-precision weights to preserve critical pathways, medium-magnitude activations use magnitude-pruned sparse weights for efficiency, and low-magnitude activations are directly discarded. Unlike prior work that uses activation-aware pruning methods like WANDA, our approach uses direct magnitude-based pruning, which we show is more robust to sample-level variations. Experiments on Llama and Mistral models demonstrate that DAWS maintains \ensuremath>98% of dense model performance at 50% sparsity, outperforming WANDA, TEAL, and R-Sparse.</abstract>
<identifier type="citekey">sun-etal-2026-dual-activation</identifier>
<location>
<url>https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.378/</url>
</location>
<part>
<date>2026-07</date>
<extent unit="page">
<start>8350</start>
<end>8366</end>
</extent>
</part>
</mods>
</modsCollection>
%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Dual Activation-Weight Sparsity: A Training-Free Framework for Efficient Large Language Model Compression
%A Sun, Luoyang
%A Li, Guangyan
%A Deng, Cheng
%A Zhang, Haifeng
%A Zhao, Jian
%A Tang, Yongqiang
%A Zhang, Wensheng
%A Wang, Jun
%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 sun-etal-2026-dual-activation
%X Large language models (LLMs) excel at natural language tasks but face deployment challenges due to computational demands. We introduce Dual Activation-Weight Sparsity (DAWS), a training-free framework that jointly exploits activation and weight sparsity through magnitude-based routing. Systematic analysis of pretrained transformers reveals two key observations: (1) the activation energy is concentrated in a few neurons, and (2) activation and weight sparsity patterns are complementary between attention and FFN layers. DAWS employs a three-tier routing strategy: high-magnitude activations pass through full-precision weights to preserve critical pathways, medium-magnitude activations use magnitude-pruned sparse weights for efficiency, and low-magnitude activations are directly discarded. Unlike prior work that uses activation-aware pruning methods like WANDA, our approach uses direct magnitude-based pruning, which we show is more robust to sample-level variations. Experiments on Llama and Mistral models demonstrate that DAWS maintains \ensuremath>98% of dense model performance at 50% sparsity, outperforming WANDA, TEAL, and R-Sparse.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.378/
%P 8350-8366
Markdown (Informal)
[Dual Activation-Weight Sparsity: A Training-Free Framework for Efficient Large Language Model Compression](https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.378/) (Sun et al., ACL 2026)
ACL
- Luoyang Sun, Guangyan Li, Cheng Deng, Haifeng Zhang, Jian Zhao, Yongqiang Tang, Wensheng Zhang, and Jun Wang. 2026. Dual Activation-Weight Sparsity: A Training-Free Framework for Efficient Large Language Model Compression. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 8350–8366, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.