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AI & Machine Learning · Advanced

Pruning

Removing less important weights, neurons or layers from a model to make it smaller and faster.

Definition

Unstructured pruning zeros individual weights; structured pruning removes whole channels, heads or layers for real speedups. Pruned models are often fine-tuned or distilled to recover accuracy, as in NVIDIA's Minitron models.

Exam tip

Pruning shrinks models by removing parameters; quantization shrinks them by lowering precision.

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