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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…

Inducing and leveraging sparse activations during training and inference is a promising avenue for improving the computational efficiency of deep networks, which is increasingly important as network sizes continue to grow and their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Ilan Price , Nicholas Daultry Ball , Samuel C. H. Lam , Adam C. Jones , Jared Tanner

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

The observation that activation sparsity emerges in MLP blocks of standardly trained Transformers offers an opportunity to drastically reduce computation costs without sacrificing performance. To theoretically explain this phenomenon,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Ze Peng , Jian Zhang , Lei Qi , Yang Gao , Yinghuan Shi

Product search is a crucial component of modern e-commerce platforms, with billions of user queries every day. In product search systems, first-stage retrieval should achieve high recall while ensuring efficient online deployment. Sparse…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Hongru Song , Yu-an Liu , Ruqing Zhang , Jiafeng Guo , Maarten de Rijke , Sen Li , Wenjun Peng , Fuyu Lv , Xueqi Cheng

The growing computational demands of large language models (LLMs) make efficient inference and activation strategies increasingly critical. While recent approaches, such as Mixture-of-Experts (MoE), leverage selective activation but require…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Sihan Chen , Dan Zhao , Jongwoo Ko , Colby Banbury , Huiping Zhuang , Luming Liang , Pashmina Cameron , Tianyi Chen

Deploying large language models (LLMs) on edge devices presents significant challenges due to the substantial computational overhead and memory requirements. Activation sparsification can mitigate these resource challenges by reducing the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Junhui He , Shangyu Wu , Weidong Wen , Chun Jason Xue , Qingan Li

This paper studies the curious phenomenon for machine learning models with Transformer architectures that their activation maps are sparse. By activation map we refer to the intermediate output of the multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) after a…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in natural language processing tasks, yet their massive size makes serving them inefficient and costly. Semi-structured pruning has emerged as an effective method for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-25 Hongyi Liu , Rajarshi Saha , Zhen Jia , Youngsuk Park , Jiaji Huang , Shoham Sabach , Yu-Xiang Wang , George Karypis

The demand for efficient large language model (LLM) inference has intensified the focus on sparsification techniques. While semi-structured (N:M) pruning is well-established for weights, its application to activation pruning remains…

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

Traditional pruning methods are known to be challenging to work in Large Language Models (LLMs) for Generative AI because of their unaffordable training process and large computational demands. For the first time, we introduce the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-25 Yun Li , Lin Niu , Xipeng Zhang , Kai Liu , Jianchen Zhu , Zhanhui Kang

A key challenge in AI alignment is guiding large language models (LLMs) to follow desired behaviors at test time. Activation steering, which modifies internal model activations during inference, offers a potential solution. However, prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Reza Bayat , Ali Rahimi-Kalahroudi , Mohammad Pezeshki , Sarath Chandar , Pascal Vincent

In this work, we systematically investigate the efficacy of dynamic activation mechanisms within the LLaMA family of language models. Despite the potential of dynamic activation methods to reduce computation and increase speed in models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-16 Chi Ma , Mincong Huang , Chao Wang , Yujie Wang , Lei Yu

Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture has become the standard for state-of-the-art large language models, owing to its computational efficiency through sparse expert activation. However, sparsity through finer expert granularity is becoming…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Jongseok Park , Sunga Kim , Zhenyu Gu , Ion Stoica , Alvin Cheung

We propose SLoPe, a Double-Pruned Sparse Plus Lazy Low-rank Adapter Pretraining method for LLMs that improves the accuracy of sparse LLMs while accelerating their pretraining and inference and reducing their memory footprint. Sparse…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-28 Mohammad Mozaffari , Amir Yazdanbakhsh , Zhao Zhang , Maryam Mehri Dehnavi

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated proficiency across various natural language processing (NLP) tasks but often require additional training, such as continual pre-training and supervised fine-tuning. However, the costs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Da Ma , Lu Chen , Pengyu Wang , Hongshen Xu , Hanqi Li , Liangtai Sun , Su Zhu , Shuai Fan , Kai Yu

Recently, inspired by the concept of sparsity, Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models have gained increasing popularity for scaling model size while keeping the number of activated parameters constant. In this study, we thoroughly investigate the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-26 Xiaoye Qu , Daize Dong , Xuyang Hu , Tong Zhu , Weigao Sun , Yu Cheng

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 demand for efficient processing of deep neural networks (DNNs) on embedded devices is a significant challenge limiting their deployment. Exploiting sparsity in the network's feature maps is one of the ways to reduce its inference…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-09-28 Matteo Grimaldi , Darshan C. Ganji , Ivan Lazarevich , Sudhakar Sah