SP³: Enhancing Structured Pruning via PCA Projection

Structured pruning is a widely used technique for reducing the size of pre-trained language models (PLMs), but current methods often overlook the potential of compressing the hidden dimension (d) in PLMs, a dimension critical to model size and efficiency. This paper introduces a novel structured pruning approach, Structured Pruning with PCA Projection (SP 3 ), targeting the effective reduction of d by projecting features into a space defined by principal components before masking. Extensive experiments on benchmarks (GLUE and SQuAD) show that SP 3 can reduce d by 70%, compress 94% of the BERT base model, and maintain over 96% accuracy and outperform other methods that compress d by 6% in accuracy at the same compression ratio. SP 3 has also proven effective with other models, including OPT and Llama. Our data and code are available at ours repo.