Pruning via Causal Attribution Preserves Reasoning Performance in Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.19350v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) excel at multi-step reasoning but incur substantial inference cost. We introduce Causal Attribution Pruning (CAP), a training-free method that identifies critical attention heads by measuring their causal impact on reasoning tasks and uses these head-level scores to guide fine-grained weight pruning. For each attention head, CAP estimates the expected performance degradation when the head is masked during forward passes on a small calibration set of reasoning problems. These causal scores are then converted into weigh

Source: arXiv cs.CL — read the full report at the original publisher.

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