DarwinLM: Evolutionary Structured Pruning of Large Language Models

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved significant success across various NLP tasks. However, their massive computational costs limit their widespread use, particularly in real-time applications. Structured pruning offers an effective solution by compressing models and directly providing end-to-end speed improvements, regardless of the hardware environment. Meanwhile, different components of the model exhibit varying sensitivities towards pruning, calling for non-uniform model compression. However, a pruning method should not only identify a capable substructure, but also account for post-compression training. To this end, we propose DarwinLM, a method for training-aware structured pruning. DarwinLM builds upon an evolutionary search process, generating multiple offspring models in each generation through mutation, and selecting the fittest for survival. To assess the effect of post-training, we incorporate a lightweight, multistep training process within the offspring population, progressively increasing the number of tokens and eliminating poorly performing models in each selection stage. We validate our method through extensive experiments on Llama-2-7B, Llama-3.1-8B and Qwen-2.5-14B-Instruct, achieving state-of-the-art performance for structured pruning. For instance, DarwinLM surpasses ShearedLlama while requiring 5x less training data during post-compression training. Code is at: https://github.com/IST-DASLab/DarwinLM

Accepted by COLM 2026 Code: https://github.com/IST-DASLab/DarwinLM

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