SkipGPT: Dynamic Layer Pruning Reinvented with Token Awareness and Module Decoupling
This addresses the problem of high computational costs for deploying large language models, offering a practical solution for resource-aware applications.
The paper tackled the computational inefficiency of large language models by introducing SkipGPT, a dynamic layer pruning framework that reduces over 40% of model parameters while matching or exceeding the performance of the original dense model across benchmarks.
Large language models (LLMs) achieve remarkable performance across tasks but incur substantial computational costs due to their deep, multi-layered architectures. Layer pruning has emerged as a strategy to alleviate these inefficiencies, but conventional static pruning methods overlook two critical dynamics inherent to LLM inference: (1) horizontal dynamics, where token-level heterogeneity demands context-aware pruning decisions, and (2) vertical dynamics, where the distinct functional roles of MLP and self-attention layers necessitate component-specific pruning policies. We introduce SkipGPT, a dynamic layer pruning framework designed to optimize computational resource allocation through two core innovations: (1) global token-aware routing to prioritize critical tokens, and (2) decoupled pruning policies for MLP and self-attention components. To mitigate training instability, we propose a two-stage optimization paradigm: first, a disentangled training phase that learns routing strategies via soft parameterization to avoid premature pruning decisions, followed by parameter-efficient LoRA fine-tuning to restore performance impacted by layer removal. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SkipGPT reduces over 40% of model parameters while matching or exceeding the performance of the original dense model across benchmarks. By harmonizing dynamic efficiency with preserved expressivity, SkipGPT advances the practical deployment of scalable, resource-aware LLMs. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/EIT-NLP/SkipGPT.