{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/junk-dna-hypothesis-a-task-centric-angle-of","title":"Pruning Small Pre-Trained Weights Irreversibly and Monotonically Impairs \"Difficult\" Downstream Tasks in LLMs","arxiv_id":"2310.02277","date":"2023-09-29","proceeding":null,"authors":["Lu Yin","Ajay Jaiswal","Shiwei Liu","Souvik Kundu","Zhangyang Wang"],"abstract":"We present Junk DNA Hypothesis by adopting a novel task-centric angle for the pre-trained weights of large language models (LLMs). It has been believed that weights in LLMs contain significant redundancy, leading to the conception that a considerable chunk of the parameters can be removed by pruning without compromising performance. Contrary to this belief, this paper presents a counter-argument: small-magnitude weights of pre-trained model weights encode vital knowledge essential for tackling difficult downstream tasks - manifested as the monotonic relationship between the performance drop of downstream tasks across the difficulty spectrum, as we prune more pre-trained weights by magnitude. Moreover, we reveal that these seemingly inconsequential weights can result in irreparable loss of knowledge and performance degradation in difficult tasks, even when downstream continual training is allowed. Interestingly, our evaluations show that the other popular compression, namely quantization, fails to exhibit similar monotonic effect and does not as convincingly disentangle this task-difficulty information. To study formally, we introduce several quantifiable metrics to gauge the downstream task difficulty: (1) within the same task category, and (2) across different task categories. Our extensive experiments substantiate the Junk DNA Hypothesis across a diverse range of model sizes, tasks, datasets, and even pruning methods. Codes are available at: https://github.com/VITA-Group/Junk_DNA_Hypothesis.git.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.02277v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.02277v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"junk-dna-hypothesis-a-task-centric-angle-of","repo_url":"https://github.com/vita-group/junk_dna_hypothesis","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"quantization","task_name":"Quantization"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"pruning","method_name":"Pruning"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2310.02277","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2310.02277","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2310.02277"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-25T09:33:49+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/vita-group/junk_dna_hypothesis","reach":null}],"summary":{"unverified":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":0,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":1,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"0619348bb5a27dda","entry":"Masking","repo":"vita-group/junk_dna_hypothesis","repo_kind":"official","path":"True_GEM/sparse/sparse_core.py","file_url":"https://github.com/vita-group/junk_dna_hypothesis/blob/HEAD/True_GEM/sparse/sparse_core.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"0619348bb5a27dda"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}