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Home/Glossary/Pruning
AI Glossary Term

What does “Pruning” mean?

Definition

Removing less important model weights or neurons to reduce size and compute.

Related terms

Sliding Window Attention
An attention pattern where each token attends only to a fixed-size window of nearby tokens to reduce compute.
Scaling Law
An empirical relationship showing how performance improves with model size, data, or compute.
Distilled Model
A smaller model trained to imitate a larger model's behavior while using less compute at inference.
Backpropagation
The core training algorithm that updates model weights by propagating prediction errors backward through the network.
Compute
The processing resources required to train and run models, often measured in FLOPS or GPU hours.
Gradient
A vector showing how much each parameter should change to reduce loss.

Learn more in our free guides

Attention Rollout and Head PruningStructured Pruning and Layer DroppingModel Pruning

See also

Prompt InjectionQuantizationPrompt EngineeringRAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)PromptRecallPretrainingRecommendation System
PreviousPrompt InjectionNextQuantization
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