Papers › SparseGPT: Massive Language Models Can Be Accurately Pruned in One-Shot

SparseGPT: Massive Language Models Can Be Accurately Pruned in One-Shot

2 Jan 2023arXiv:2301.00774archive 2025-07-28

Elias Frantar, Dan Alistarh

We show for the first time that large-scale generative pretrained transformer (GPT) family models can be pruned to at least 50% sparsity in one-shot, without any retraining, at minimal loss of accuracy. This is achieved via a new pruning method called SparseGPT, specifically designed to work efficiently and accurately on massive GPT-family models. We can execute SparseGPT on the largest available open-source models, OPT-175B and BLOOM-176B, in under 4.5 hours, and can reach 60% unstructured sparsity with negligible increase in perplexity: remarkably, more than 100 billion weights from these models can be ignored at inference time. SparseGPT generalizes to semi-structured (2:4 and 4:8) patterns, and is compatible with weight quantization approaches. The code is available at: https://github.com/IST-DASLab/sparsegpt.

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Code

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ist-daslab/sparsegpt officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorchApache-2.0 report
baithebest/adagp mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
baithebest/sparsellm mentioned on GitHubpytorchApache-2.0 report
eth-easl/deltazip mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
nvidia/tensorrt-model-optimizer mentioned on GitHubpytorchApache-2.0 report
nvlabs/maskllm mentioned on GitHubpytorchNOASSERTION report

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2ran · our draft was wrong
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get_bloom ist-daslab/sparsegpt/bloom.py official repository ran · our draft was wrong Apache-2.0 (permissive) · cd666c16d4aaa66d · report
bloom_sequential ist-daslab/sparsegpt/bloom.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 5076786563dd8499 · report
opt_sequential ist-daslab/sparsegpt/opt.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · bf403ae47e912dc1 · report
get_language_model_from_vl nvidia/tensorrt-model-optimizer/modelopt/torch/export/model_utils.py community (archive-listed) unverified Apache-2.0 recorded; this copy not marked cleared · pointer only · f1c26f01bf2f39a9 · report
get_model_type nvidia/tensorrt-model-optimizer/modelopt/torch/export/model_utils.py community (archive-listed) unverified Apache-2.0 recorded; this copy not marked cleared · pointer only · bc6cfb190b953479 · report
is_multimodal_model nvidia/tensorrt-model-optimizer/modelopt/torch/export/model_utils.py community (archive-listed) unverified Apache-2.0 recorded; this copy not marked cleared · pointer only · 140c6ce5087cbbce · report
pad_weights nvidia/tensorrt-model-optimizer/modelopt/torch/export/trtllm/model_config_utils.py community (archive-listed) unverified Apache-2.0 recorded; this copy not marked cleared · pointer only · f36d24bde785f7cc · report
postprocess_amax nvidia/tensorrt-model-optimizer/modelopt/torch/quantization/model_quant.py community (archive-listed) unverified Apache-2.0 recorded; this copy not marked cleared · pointer only · 1c19ab0c6ad9a45c · report
prepare_enc_dec_export_dir nvidia/tensorrt-model-optimizer/modelopt/torch/export/trtllm/tensorrt_llm_utils.py community (archive-listed) unverified Apache-2.0 recorded; this copy not marked cleared · pointer only · e9eca650c1a383f2 · report
student_input_bypass_fwd_hook nvidia/tensorrt-model-optimizer/modelopt/torch/distill/layerwise_distillation_model.py community (archive-listed) unverified Apache-2.0 recorded; this copy not marked cleared · pointer only · e3133ddfe52e03a0 · report
svd nvidia/tensorrt-model-optimizer/modelopt/torch/quantization/model_calib.py community (archive-listed) unverified Apache-2.0 recorded; this copy not marked cleared · pointer only · 54d01cbd62cf758a · report
get_opt identical code first harvested elsewhere ran · our draft was wrong licence of this copy not recorded · 887f43fe08a6472d · report

Tasks

Common Sense ReasoningLanguage ModellingQuantizationQuestion Answering

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Common Sense Reasoning ARC (Challenge) OPT-175B Accuracy 43.94 #44 of 54 Archive leaderboard report
Common Sense Reasoning ARC (Challenge) SparseGPT (175B, 50% Sparsity) Accuracy 41.3 #46 of 54 Archive leaderboard report
Common Sense Reasoning ARC (Challenge) SparseGPT (175B, 4:8 Sparsity) Accuracy 39.85 #47 of 54 Archive leaderboard report
Common Sense Reasoning ARC (Challenge) SparseGPT (175B, 2:4 Sparsity) Accuracy 38.99 #48 of 54 Archive leaderboard report
Common Sense Reasoning ARC (Challenge) OPT-175B (50% Sparsity) Accuracy 25.6 #54 of 54 Archive leaderboard report
Common Sense Reasoning ARC (Easy) OPT-175B Accuracy 71.04 #31 of 47 Archive leaderboard report
Common Sense Reasoning ARC (Easy) SparseGPT 175B (50% sparsity) Accuracy 69.65 #36 of 47 Archive leaderboard report
Common Sense Reasoning ARC (Easy) SparseGPT (175B, 4:8 Sparsity) Accuracy 68.35 #39 of 47 Archive leaderboard report
Common Sense Reasoning ARC (Easy) SparseGPT 175B (2:4 sparsity) Accuracy 67.08 #41 of 47 Archive leaderboard report
Common Sense Reasoning ARC (Easy) OPT 175B (50% Sparsity) Accuracy 28.03 #47 of 47 Archive leaderboard report
Language Modelling LAMBADA SparseGPT (175B, 2:4 Sparsity) Accuracy 79.47 #13 of 37 Archive leaderboard report
Language Modelling LAMBADA SparseGPT (175B, 4:8 Sparsity) Accuracy 78.77 #14 of 37 Archive leaderboard report
Language Modelling LAMBADA SparseGPT (175B, 50% Sparsity) Accuracy 76.51 #17 of 37 Archive leaderboard report
Language Modelling LAMBADA OPT-175B Accuracy 75.59 #19 of 37 Archive leaderboard report
Language Modelling LAMBADA OPT-175B (50% Sparsity) Accuracy 0.02 #33 of 37 Archive leaderboard report
Language Modelling WikiText-2 SparseGPT (175B, 50% Sparsity) Test perplexity 8.21 #1 of 38 Archive leaderboard report
Language Modelling WikiText-2 OPT-175B Test perplexity 8.34 #2 of 38 Archive leaderboard report
Language Modelling WikiText-2 SparseGPT (175B, 4:8 Sparsity) Test perplexity 8.45 #3 of 38 Archive leaderboard report
Language Modelling WikiText-2 SparseGPT (175B, 2:4 Sparsity) Test perplexity 8.73 #4 of 38 Archive leaderboard report
Language Modelling WikiText-2 OPT-175B (50% Sparsity) Test perplexity 234.77 #38 of 38 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering PIQA OPT-175B Accuracy 81.07 #28 of 67 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering PIQA SparseGPT 175B (50% Sparsity) Accuracy 80.63 #30 of 67 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering PIQA SparseGPT 175B (4:8 Sparsity) Accuracy 79.54 #35 of 67 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering PIQA SparseGPT 175B (2:4 Sparsity) Accuracy 79.54 #36 of 67 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering PIQA OPT-175B (50% Sparsity) Accuracy 54.73 #66 of 67 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering StoryCloze OPT-175B Accuracy 79.82 #10 of 23 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering StoryCloze SparseGPT (175B, 50% Sparsity) Accuracy 78.87 #11 of 23 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering StoryCloze SparseGPT (175B, 4:8 Sparsity) Accuracy 77.02 #14 of 23 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering StoryCloze SparseGPT (175B, 2:4 Sparsity) Accuracy 76.19 #16 of 23 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering StoryCloze OPT-175B (50% Sparsity) Accuracy 47.10 #23 of 23 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

Pruning

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