LLM Pruning and Distillation in Practice

provides a comprehensive report on effective methods for compressing Llama 3.1 and Mistral NeMo models; it presents pruning and distillation approaches applied to the original models to produce 4B and 8B parameter models, respectively; before pruning, they also fine-tune the teacher model on their datasets leading to better distillation; their compression strategy yields a state-of-the-art 8B model (MN-Minitron-8B) which outperforms all similarly-sized models on common language modeling benchmarks.