Candidate-Label Saliency for Efficient Conformal Pruning of Text Classifiers

Post-training LLM pruning relies on a small calibration set, usually chosen heuristically and judged by WikiText perplexity or by mean accuracy on general-domain commonsense benchmarks. This single-axis view hides capability-specific effects: at 60% sparsity, strategies separated by $2.85$ points in averaged commonsense accuracy diverge by $51.9$ points in code retention, and across 15 sources no single one preserves all capabilities. We treat calibration as a capability-coverage problem. Balanced, a uniform four-way mixture under a fixed budget, tests the principle on real corpora: it outperforms every evaluated single source, and its margin over C4 grows from $+4.6$ points at 30% sparsity to $+18.8$ at 60%. The advantage holds across model scale and a second model family, and transfers to held-out benchmarks disjoint from calibration construction. When aligned corpora are unavailable, IGSP approximates that mixture from the base model and the evaluation taxonomy alone, outperforming prior self-generation methods by $7.23$--$12.79$ points on the LLaMA main suite. On Qwen2.5-7B, IGSP exceeds Balanced on both the main suite and held-out benchmarks. Capability coverage is a first-order design variable for high-sparsity pruning.

Post-training pruning enables efficient deployment, but conventional methods do not explicitly preserve internal-gradient alignment between sparse and dense models. We study novel connections between downstream performance of compressed models and the ability to retain gradient information via influence-function preservation. Central to this connection is a curvature-aware objective that accounts for both layer activations and backpropagated gradients. Despite its promise, this objective remains underexplored in pruning due to a lack of efficient solvers. We introduce $\texttt{CACTUS}$, a novel ADMM-based optimizer supporting both pruning and sparse-plus-low-rank decompositions of pre-trained weights. Compared to LLM-Surgeon which targets the same objective, $\texttt{CACTUS}$ can achieve over an order-of-magnitude speedup. At $50\%$ pruning of Qwen3-4B, $\texttt{CACTUS}$ reduces the C4 perplexity gap to the dense model by $45\%$, improves compressed-to-dense per-sample gradient cosine similarity on WikiText-2 from $0.670$ to $0.755$, and runs over $28\times$ faster than LLM-Surgeon on substantially weaker hardware. By preserving influence functions, $\texttt{CACTUS}$ supports effective data selection. On Llama-3.2-3B, fine-tuning a fresh dense model on the $5\%$ of data selected by $\texttt{CACTUS}$ achieves $49.44\%$ accuracy on BIG-Bench Hard, compared with $47.22\%$ using ALPS and $49.54\%$ using dense-model selection. Finally, integrating $\texttt{CACTUS}$ with LoGRA, a recent gradient-projection strategy, on Qwen3-4B with MLP layers pruned to 2:4 sparsity and a rank-64 correction retains a $0.711$ cosine alignment with dense LoGRA-projected C4 gradients.

Large reasoning models (LRMs) generate long chain-of-thought traces before answering, creating significant inference overhead. Pruning can reduce this cost, but its effectiveness depends on the calibration data used to estimate parameter importance. Recent work calibrates on the model's own rollouts instead of generic dataset, but treats all reasoning tokens uniformly, regardless of whether they contribute to successful reasoning. As a result, pruning protects weights by statistical salience rather than by their contribution to correct reasoning, so weights behind erroneous computation survive as readily as those behind correct computation. These erroneous patterns then get carried into the pruned model, degrading reasoning quality, producing both lower accuracy and longer reasoning traces. We propose Outcome-Based Calibration for Large Reasoning Model Pruning (OBC-Prune) to close this gap. OBC first constructs difficulty-matched pairs of correct and incorrect rollouts from problems the model answers inconsistently. It then estimates the causal importance of each reasoning sentence through intervention-based analysis, quantifying how removing its influence affects subsequent predictions. These causal importance scores are converted into per-token weights that rescale the calibration activations used by one-shot pruning methods (SparseGPT, Wanda, ALPS), without modifying the underlying pruning algorithms. Experiments on DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen 1.5B, 7B, and 14B models at 40% and 50% sparsity demonstrate consistent improvements over state-of-the-art calibration baselines across most model sizes and sparsity levels on MATH500, LiveCodeBench, and AIME 2025. These results indicate that preserving causally important reasoning circuits is a substantially more effective pruning objective than uniformly preserving observed activations.