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Sparser, Faster, Lighter Transformer Language Models (arxiv.org)
3 points by matt_d 171 days ago | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: They pack the model's biggest layers as mostly zeros in a new layout, with GPU code that skips the zeros during training and use. Shrinking weights toward zero made over 99% vanish with little quality loss, saving time, energy and memory, especially at larger scale.

Abstract

Scaling autoregressive large language models (LLMs) has driven unprecedented progress but comes with vast computational costs. In this work, we tackle these costs by leveraging unstructured sparsity within an LLM's feedforward layers, the components accounting for most of the model parameters and execution FLOPs. To achieve this, we introduce a new sparse packing format and a set of CUDA kernels designed to seamlessly integrate with the optimized execution pipelines of modern GPUs, enabling efficient sparse computation during LLM inference and training. To substantiate our gains, we provide a quantitative study of LLM sparsity, demonstrating that simple L1 regularization can induce over 99% sparsity with negligible impact on downstream performance. When paired with our kernels, we show that these sparsity levels translate into substantial throughput, energy efficiency, and memory usage benefits that increase with model scale. We will release all code and kernels under an open-source license to promote adoption and accelerate research toward establishing sparsity as a practical axis for improving the efficiency and scalability of modern foundation models.

Edoardo Cetin, Stefano Peluchetti, Emilio Castillo, Akira Naruse, Mana Murakami, Llion Jones
arXiv:2603.23198 · cs.LG, cs.CL · submitted Mar 24, 2026 · updated May 8, 2026
abstract · pdf · html · Code and checkpoints available at: https://github.com/SakanaAI/sparser-faster-llms

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