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Automated Contiguous Layer Pruning for Large Language Models (arxiv.org)
1 point by PaulHoule 325 days ago | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Instead of scoring and deleting layers one at a time, this tool learns which continuous block of layers to cut, then retrains the layers bordering the gap. Removing 20% of layers kept 95.34% of LLaMA3-70B's performance, beating prior layer-scoring methods by 4.29 to 30.52%.

Abstract · The Structural Scalpel: Automated Contiguous Layer Pruning for Large Language Models

Although large language models (LLMs) have achieved revolutionary breakthroughs in many fields, their large model size and high computational cost pose significant challenges for practical deployment on resource-constrained edge devices. To this end, layer pruning has been proposed to reduce the computational overhead by directly removing redundant layers. However, existing layer pruning methods typically rely on hand-crafted metrics to evaluate and remove individual layers, while ignoring the dependencies between layers. This can disrupt the model's information flow and severely degrade performance. To address these issues, we propose CLP, a novel continuous layer pruning framework that introduces two key innovations: a differentiable concave gate algorithm that automatically identifies the best continuous layer segments for pruning via gradient-based optimization; and a cutoff endpoint tuning strategy that effectively restores model performance by fine-tuning only the layers adjacent to the pruned segments. Extensive experiments across multiple model architectures (including LLaMA2, LLaMA3 and Qwen) and sizes (from $7$B to $70$B parameters) show that CLP significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art baselines. For example, at a pruning rate of $20\%$, CLP achieves an average performance retention of $95.34\%$ on LLaMA3-70B, outperforming baselines by $4.29\%$-$30.52\%$. Furthermore, CLP can be seamlessly combined with quantization to further compress the model with only a slight performance loss.

Yao Lu, Yuqi Li, Wenbin Xie, Shanqing Yu, Qi Xuan, Zhaowei Zhu, Shiping Wen
arXiv:2510.23652 · cs.LG, cs.AI · submitted Oct 25, 2025
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