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Public story · 2026-07-31 · high
At 50% sparsity the method beats the best depth-pruning baseline by 55.1% on quality with no retraining, and its code is already public.
Why now: The paper posted to arXiv in July 2026 with runnable code attached, so the 4.95x decoding claim can be checked against real models, not just a benchmark table.
WIDE, a new pruning method, cuts decoding time by up to 4.95x by letting each token choose its own attention-head and FFN-channel groups, per the paper posted to arXiv.
That's the tradeoff pitch: at 50% sparsity, WIDE beats the best existing dynamic depth pruning method by 55.1% on quality, using calibration data alone. No retraining pass is required.
Most pruning approaches decide sparsity at the layer level, dropping the same blocks for every token that passes through. WIDE pushes that decision down to individual attention-head groups and FFN-channel groups, and it runs across both the prefill and decode passes rather than one. Each token ends up with its own pruning pattern, set by an end-to-end differentiable framework trained into the model rather than picked by hand.
The kernel numbers back that up. Prefill runs up to 1.98x faster and decoding up to 4.95x faster, with 1.68x and 1.55x gains once measured end-to-end. The authors released their code alongside the paper, so anyone can check the speedup claims against a real implementation instead of a PDF table.
The paper doesn't specify which base models it tested WIDE on, so it's unclear how the speedups translate across architectures.
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Shared entity: Code / Same source domain / Shared topic / Earlier coverage
Both cover Code; reported by the same outlet (arxiv.org); overlapping topics (code, token).
Both cover Code; reported by the same outlet (arxiv.org); overlapping topics (code, token).
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Both cover Code; reported by the same outlet (arxiv.org); earlier Code coverage from 2026-07-29.
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Both cover Code; reported by the same outlet (arxiv.org); earlier Code coverage from 2026-07-27.
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Both cover Code; overlapping topics (code, depth); earlier Code coverage from 2026-07-27.