ProSparse: Introducing and Enhancing Intrinsic Activation Sparsity within Large Language Models

Abstract

Activation sparsity refers to the existence of considerable weakly-contributed elements among activation outputs, serving as a promising paradigm for accelerating model inference. Nevertheless, most large language models (LLMs) adopt activation functions without intrinsic activation sparsity (e.g., GELU and Swish). Some recent efforts have explored introducing ReLU or its variants as the substitutive activation function to pursue activation sparsity and acceleration, but few can simultaneously obtain high activation sparsity and comparable model performance. This paper introduces a simple and effective method named “ProSparse” to sparsify LLMs while achieving both targets. Specifically, after introducing ReLU activation, ProSparse adopts progressive sparsity regularization with a factor smoothly increasing for multiple stages. This can enhance activation sparsity and mitigate performance degradation by avoiding radical shifts in activation distributions. With ProSparse, we obtain high sparsity of 89.32% for LLaMA2-7B, 88.80% for LLaMA2-13B, and 87.89% for end-size MiniCPM-1B, respectively, with comparable performance to their original Swish-activated versions. These present the most sparsely activated models among open-source LLaMA versions and competitive end-size models. Inference acceleration experiments further demonstrate the significant practical acceleration potential of LLMs with higher activation sparsity, obtaining up to 4.52x inference speedup.