Skip to yearly menu bar Skip to main content


Poster

SLEB: Streamlining LLMs through Redundancy Verification and Elimination of Transformer Blocks

Jiwon Song · Kyungseok Oh · Taesu Kim · Hyungjun Kim · Yulhwa Kim · jae-joon kim

Hall C 4-9 #815
[ ] [ Project Page ]
Wed 24 Jul 2:30 a.m. PDT — 4 a.m. PDT

Abstract:

Large language models (LLMs) have proven to be highly effective across various natural language processing tasks. However, their large number of parameters poses significant challenges for practical deployment. Pruning, a technique aimed at reducing the size and complexity of LLMs, offers a potential solution by removing redundant components from the network. Despite the promise of pruning, existing methods often struggle to achieve substantial end-to-end LLM inference speedup. In this paper, we introduce SLEB, a novel approach designed to stream- line LLMs by eliminating redundant transformer blocks. We choose the transformer block as the fundamental unit for pruning, because LLMs exhibit block-level redundancy with high similarity between the outputs of neighboring blocks. This choice allows us to effectively enhance the processing speed of LLMs. Our experimental results demonstrate that SLEB outperforms previous LLM pruning methods in accelerating LLM inference while also maintaining superior perplexity and accuracy, making SLEB as a promising technique for enhancing the efficiency of LLMs. The code is available at: https://github.com/jiwonsong-dev/SLEB.

Live content is unavailable. Log in and register to view live content