Extracting Sparse Specialist Models from Generalist Models

Abstract

Recently, several generalist models such as Contrastive Language Image Pre-training (CLIP) have demonstrated their capabilities of performing diverse downstream tasks through zero-shot or few-shot guidance. When these generalist models are used for the specific downstream task where only a fraction of features is relevant, they would suffer from a significant redundancy of parameters. While existing methods aim to achieve sparsity and specialization, they often require additional training and large datasets. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to extract a sparse specialist model from a generalist model using only few-shot samples, without any training. Our task-specific pruning framework defines task relevance metrics and employs weighted layer-wise pruning, preserving relevant features while removing redundancies. Experiments show that our method maintains nearly identical zero-shot accuracy compared to the original generalist models at 30% sparsity, with only minimal decline at 50%.