不要丢弃Dropout：优化层稀疏性以实现高效的LLM训练与推理

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence arXiv:2609.05275 (cs) [Submitted on 4 Sep 2026] Title:Don't Drop Dropout: Optimizing Layer Sparsity for Efficient LLM Training and Inference Authors:Mostafa Elhoushi, Alex Pretko, Nolan Dey, Bin Claire Zhang, Gavia Gray, Gurpreet Gosal, Abdulrahman Mahmoud, Shane Bergsma, Joel Hestness View a PDF of the paper titled Don't Drop Dropout: Optimizing Layer Sparsity for Efficient LLM Training and Inference, by Mostafa Elhoushi and 8 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Layer dropout (a.k.a. stochastic depth) has been shown to enable faster training, higher accuracy, and robustness to zero-shot layer pruning in both language and vision transformers. However, as models and datasets have scaled, dropout - particularly layer dropout - has largely disappeared from large language models (LLMs) pre-training recipes. While some prior work has reported that dropout can degrade accuracy, no comprehensive study has quantified, let alone mitigated, this effect. In this study, we show that layer dropout should be used in state-of-the-art LLM training, establishing best practices and scaling analysis for both training and post-training benefits. Concretely, with optimal layer distribution, time schedule, and optimizer hyperparameters, we observe that at the same training FLOPs layer dropout leads to lower loss. For a given number of training steps, LLMs can achieve lower or similar validation loss while saving upto 25% of training FLOPs. Moreover, layer dropout enables significant post-training optimizations, such as early exit, intermediate-layer skipping, and self-speculative decoding, yielding up to 1.5x inference speedup with negligible accuracy loss. Across more than 2400 training experiments, spanning models from 271M to 8.2B parameters and datasets up to 160B tokens, we demonstrate that these findings extend reliably to large-scale training regimes. All pre-training experiments were run on Cerebras CS-3 systems. Comments: This is a slightly extended version of the paper published at ICML 2026 Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) Cite as: arXiv:2609.05275 [cs.AI] (or arXiv:2609.05275v1 [cs.AI] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.05275 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) Journal reference: Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2026) Submission history From: Mostafa Elhoushi [view email] [v1] Fri, 4 Sep 2026 15:30:47 UTC (1,012 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled Don't Drop Dropout: Optimizing Layer Sparsity for Efficient LLM Training and Inference, by Mostafa Elhoushi and 8 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) TeX Source view license Current browse context: cs.AI new | recent | 2026-09 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar export BibTeX citation Loading... BibTeX formatted citation × loading... Data provided by: Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub (What is DagsHub?) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate (What is Replicate?) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender (What is CORE?) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs. Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)