The Super Weight in Large Language Models

Recent works have shown a surprising result: a small fraction of Large Language Model (LLM) parameter outliers are disproportionately important to the quality of the model. LLMs contain billions of parameters, so these small fractions, such as 0.01%, translate to hundreds of thousands of parameters. In this work, we present an even more surprising finding: Pruning as few as a single parameter can destroy an LLM’s ability to generate text — increasing perplexity by 3 orders of magnitude and reducing zero-shot accuracy to guessing. We propose a data-free method for identifying such parameters…