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Neural network models are widely used in solving many challenging problems, such as computer vision, personalized recommendation, and natural language processing. Those models are very computationally intensive and reach the hardware limit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-28 Fei Sun , Minghai Qin , Tianyun Zhang , Liu Liu , Yen-Kuang Chen , Yuan Xie

Dense large language models(LLMs) face critical efficiency bottlenecks as they rigidly activate all parameters regardless of input complexity. While existing sparsity methods(static pruning or dynamic activation) address this partially,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-27 Yiheng Yang , Yujie Wang , Chi Ma , Lei Yu , Emmanuele Chersoni , Chu-Ren Huang

Sparse coding algorithms are about finding a linear basis in which signals can be represented by a small number of active (non-zero) coefficients. Such coding has many applications in science and engineering and is believed to play an…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2016-08-14 András Lőrincz , Zsolt Palotai , Gábor Szirtes

Accelerating large language model (LLM) inference is critical for real-world deployments requiring high throughput and low latency. Contextual sparsity, where each token dynamically activates only a small subset of the model parameters,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Susav Shrestha , Brad Settlemyer , Nikoli Dryden , Narasimha Reddy

Despite rapid adoption and deployment of large language models (LLMs), the internal computations of these models remain opaque and poorly understood. In this work, we seek to understand how high-level human-interpretable features are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-06 Wes Gurnee , Neel Nanda , Matthew Pauly , Katherine Harvey , Dmitrii Troitskii , Dimitris Bertsimas

In principle, sparse neural networks should be significantly more efficient than traditional dense networks. Neurons in the brain exhibit two types of sparsity; they are sparsely interconnected and sparsely active. These two types of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-30 Kevin Lee Hunter , Lawrence Spracklen , Subutai Ahmad

As the development and application of Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to advance rapidly, enhancing their trustworthiness and aligning them with human preferences has become a critical area of research. Traditional methods rely…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-06 Yuxin Xiao , Chaoqun Wan , Yonggang Zhang , Wenxiao Wang , Binbin Lin , Xiaofei He , Xu Shen , Jieping Ye

In this paper, we demonstrate how to leverage 2:4 sparsity, a popular hardware-accelerated GPU sparsity pattern, to activations to accelerate large language model training and inference. Crucially we exploit the intrinsic sparsity found in…

Fine-tuning LLMs is both computationally and memory-intensive. While parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods, such as QLoRA and DoRA, reduce the number of trainable parameters and lower memory usage, they do not decrease computational cost.…

We prove the first guarantees of sparse recovery for ReLU neural networks, where the sparse network weights constitute the signal to be recovered. Specifically, we study structural properties of the sparse network weights for two-layer,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Sara Fridovich-Keil , Mert Pilanci

While the concept of a Sparse Neural Network has been researched for some time, researchers have only recently made notable progress in the matter. Techniques like Sparse Evolutionary Training allow for significantly lower computational…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2020-10-14 Adam Dubowski

The full-size MLPs and the projection layers in attention introduce tremendous model sizes of large language models (LLMs), consuming extensive computational resources in pre-training. We empirically observe that the activations of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Ziyue Liu , Ruijie Zhang , Zhengyang Wang , Mingsong Yan , Zi Yang , Paul Hovland , Bogdan Nicolae , Franck Cappello , Sui Tang , Zheng Zhang

Contextual sparsity is one of the approaches used to reduce computational complexity in the inference process of large language models (LLMs). Existing techniques for efficient LLM inference acceleration based on contextual sparsity with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Georgii Serbin , Kirill Koshkin , Zhongao Sun , Anastasiya Bistrigova , C. C. Korikov

We study neural networks with trainable low-degree rational activation functions and show that they are more expressive and parameter-efficient than modern piecewise-linear and smooth activations such as ELU, LeakyReLU, LogSigmoid, PReLU,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Maosen Tang , Alex Townsend

We propose ReDense as a simple and low complexity way to improve the performance of trained neural networks. We use a combination of random weights and rectified linear unit (ReLU) activation function to add a ReLU dense (ReDense) layer to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Alireza M. Javid , Sandipan Das , Mikael Skoglund , Saikat Chatterjee

Large language models (LLMs) with billions of parameters have sparked a new wave of exciting AI applications. However, their high computational costs and memory demands during inference pose significant challenges. Adaptive sparse…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-25 Qinsi Wang , Saeed Vahidian , Hancheng Ye , Jianyang Gu , Jianyi Zhang , Yiran Chen

We consider the problem of accurate sparse fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs), that is, fine-tuning pretrained LLMs on specialized tasks, while inducing sparsity in their weights. On the accuracy side, we observe that standard…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-16 Eldar Kurtic , Denis Kuznedelev , Elias Frantar , Michael Goin , Dan Alistarh

The high power consumption and latency-sensitive deployments of large language models (LLMs) have motivated efficiency techniques like quantization and sparsity. Contextual sparsity, where the sparsity pattern is input-dependent, is crucial…

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) integrate information from multiple modalities and have shown remarkable success across various tasks. However, deploying large-scale VLMs in resource-constrained scenarios is challenging. Pruning followed by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-26 Shwai He , Ang Li , Tianlong Chen

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit substantial performance disparities across languages, particularly between high- and low-resource settings. We propose a framework for improving performance in underrepresented languages while preserving…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Daniil Gurgurov , Tanja Baeumel , Josef van Genabith , Simon Ostermann