Leveraging the True Depth of LLMs

Abstract

Large Language Models demonstrate remarkable capabilities at the cost of high compute requirements. While recent research has shown that interme- diate layers can be removed or have their order shuffled without impacting performance significantly, these findings have not been employed to reduce the computational cost of inference. We investigate several potential ways to reduce the depth of pre-trained LLMs without significantly affecting performance. Leveraging our insights, we present a novel approach that exploits this decoupling between layers by grouping some of them into pairs that can be evaluated in parallel. This modification of the computational graph—through better parallelism—results in an average improvement of around 1.20x on the number of tokens generated per second, without re- training nor fine-tuning, while retaining 95%-99% of the original accuracy. Empirical evaluation demonstrates that this approach significantly improves serving efficiency while maintaining model performance, offering a practical improvement for large-scale LLM deployment.