In plain words: It deletes unneeded weights from a large language model in small blocks, with masks that shift toward whatever weights matter most, so the model fits hardware-friendly patterns. It beat the best current weight-cutting methods both for grouped and one-by-one removal.
Abstract · Thanos: A Block-wise Pruning Algorithm for Efficient Large Language Model Compression
This paper presents Thanos, a novel weight-pruning algorithm designed to reduce the memory footprint and enhance the computational efficiency of large language models (LLMs) by removing redundant weights while maintaining accuracy. Thanos introduces a block-wise pruning strategy with adaptive masks that dynamically adjust to weight importance, enabling flexible sparsity patterns and structured formats, such as $n:m$ sparsity, optimized for hardware acceleration. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that Thanos achieves state-of-the-art performance in structured pruning and outperforms existing methods in unstructured pruning. By providing an efficient and adaptable approach to model compression, Thanos offers a practical solution for deploying large models in resource-constrained environments.
Ivan Ilin, Peter Richtarik
arXiv:2504.05346 · cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.PF · submitted Apr 6, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · 8 pages, 3 Figures, 3 Tables, 2 Algorithms, paper comes with Appendix