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abstract indexed · arXiv 2610.18516 · updated 2026-10-18

Two For The Price Of One: Curvature-Aware Pruning Preserves Influence Functions Too

First page of Two For The Price Of One: Curvature-Aware Pruning Preserves Influence Functions Too
From the original paper · arXiv 2610.18516Page 1. Select the image to read the PDF.

CACTUS replaces standard post-training pruning solvers (and the LLM-Surgeon optimizer) with an ADMM-based method that jointly matches layer activations and backpropagated gradients, supporting both pruning and sparse-plus-low-rank decompositions. It costs a calibration optimization pass per layer, added implementation complexity over magnitude or WANDA-style pruning, and optionally memory for the low-rank correction term. It can fail if the calibration data is unrepresentative of deployment inputs, if the target hardware lacks sparse-kernel support to realize 2:4 speedups, or if influence-function preservation does not transfer to tasks beyond the evaluated data-selection and perplexity settings.

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What you would change

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Try the idea on your product

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Compare against

The original unpruned model at the same precision, context, and load.

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What to measure

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Why it was shortlisted

The technical change, research area, and reason it entered the archive.

recommendation
test
research area
sparsity and pruning
technical change
Curvature-aware pruning via ADMM (CACTUS)
published
2026-10-13

It fits single-GPU post-training workflows and shows measurable quality gains over existing pruning at 50% sparsity, but adoption should follow workload-specific validation of calibration cost and sparse-inference support.

About the technical core

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Claims and evidence

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  1. claim 01Paperraft inference
    Read the brief interpretation

    CACTUS replaces standard post-training pruning solvers (and the LLM-Surgeon optimizer) with an ADMM-based method that jointly matches layer activations and backpropagated gradients, supporting both pruning and sparse-plus-low-rank decompositions. It costs a calibration optimization pass per layer, added implementation complexity over magnitude or WANDA-style pruning, and optionally memory for the low-rank correction term. It can fail if the calibration data is unrepresentative of deployment inputs, if the target hardware lacks sparse-kernel support to realize 2:4 speedups, or if influence-function preservation does not transfer to tasks beyond the evaluated data-selection and perplexity settings.

    This is a Paperraft inference. It is not pinned to a verified PDF passage.

    Inspect the source
  2. claim 02Paperraft inference

    Runs over 28x faster than LLM-Surgeon on substantially weaker hardware, while reducing the C4 perplexity gap to the dense model by 45% at 50% pruning of Qwen3-4B.

    This is a Paperraft inference. It is not pinned to a verified PDF passage.

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Exposure map

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quality

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Which tasks improve, and which regress against the baseline?

compute and memory

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latency

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operations

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software compatibility

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security

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data and training

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What data preparation or training is required, and is it included in the cost?

reproducibility

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Continue the investigation

A reading guide for sparsity and pruning.

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What to inspect

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Plan a fair comparison

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Questions for adoption

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Inside the paper

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Provisional research brief updated 2026-10-18. Paperraft has not reproduced this experiment.

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arXiv 2610.18516

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