Damage-Aware Bandit Pruning for Vision and Language Transformers

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence

[Submitted on 2 Aug 2026]

Title:Damage-Aware Bandit Pruning for Vision and Language Transformers

View PDFAbstract:Structured post-training pruning of transformers requires selecting complete functional units whose suppression causes limited degradation. We formulate structured-unit selection for language and vision transformers as a damage-aware multi-armed bandit problem under a fixed candidate-evaluation budget. Attention heads and MLP channel groups are temporarily masked on calibration batches. Paired damage is the masked loss minus the base loss on the same batch, reducing batch-to-batch variation. A smooth bounded reward drives either a UCB-style policy or fractional-Beta Thompson Sampling, and the final mask is constructed sequentially by adding one unit at each step. The selected units are functionally zeroed in the original dense checkpoint; therefore, the reported parameter effects represent effective structural suppression rather than physical compression or measured speedup. Experiments on WikiText-2, LAMBADA, and Imagenette cover GPT-2, OPT, Pythia, Qwen2.5, SmolLM2, ViT-B/16, DeiT-Tiny, and Swin-Tiny, with comparisons against random, magnitude, static-saliency, and budgeted-greedy selection. Across five seeds, the bandit methods usually reduce degradation relative to budgeted greedy in the paired language-model comparisons. Of 28 comparisons highlighted in the paper, 23 bootstrap confidence intervals exclude zero and 11 paired tests have p < 0.05; six have q < 0.05 after Benjamini-Hochberg correction across the full family of 116 dataset-wise tests. Matched-evaluation results for ViT-B/16 and Swin-Tiny indicate that their gains are not explained solely by a larger candidate-evaluation budget.

References & Citations

Loading...

Bibliographic and Citation Tools

Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?)

Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?)

Litmaps (What is Litmaps?)

scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?)

Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article

alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?)

CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?)

DagsHub (What is DagsHub?)

Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?)

Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?)

ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?)

Demos

Recommenders and Search Tools

Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?)

CORE Recommender (What is CORE?)

arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.