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Forward-Free LLM Depth Pruning via Weight Redundancy

arxiv.org/abs/2609.09883

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Updated 2 h ago · first seen 11 Sept 2026

paper_01M294GMYJP40N3XQ71B9DN7CM

Published
11 Sept 2026
T1 · 2 h ago
arXiv
2609.09883
T1 · 2 h ago
Category
cs.LG
T1 · 2 h ago

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Abstractabstract1

Claim history for Abstract
ValueValid from → toStatusSourceConfidenceExtractor
Depth pruning reduces large language model (LLM) inference cost by removing complete Transformer blocks. Activation-based methods collect hidden states through forward passes on calibration data, while existing forward-free methods score each Transformer block separately without measuring similarity between blocks. We propose Weight-Redundancy Pruning (WRP), a forward-free depth-pruning method that estimates inter-layer redundancy from checkpoint weights to select blocks without calibration data or model forward passes. WRP compares attention output and MLP down-projection weights across layers and combines their pairwise similarities with relative projection-scale information. The resulting all-pairs similarity matrix guides layer grouping and block selection. Across multiple pruning settings, model families, and downstream tasks, WRP consistently outperforms existing forward-free magnitude pruning and approaches the performance of activation-based methods.currentcurrentarXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1highdeterministic

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