Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) have become a fixture in
modern machine learning. Correspondingly, significant resources are allocated
towards research that aims to further advance this technology, typically
resulting in models of increasing size that are trained on increasing amounts
of data. This work, however, demonstrates the surprising result that it is
often possible to significantly improve the performance of LLMs by selectively
removing higher-order components of their weight matrices. This simple
intervention, which we call LAyer-SElective Rank reduction (LASER), can be done
on a model after training has completed, and requires no additional parameters
or data. We show extensive experiments demonstrating the generality of this
finding across language models and datasets, and provide in-depth analyses
offering insights into both when LASER is effective and the mechanism by which
it operates.

通过选择性删除大型语言模型（LLMs）的高阶权重矩阵组成部分，可以显著提高其性能，称为 LASER（LAyer-SElective Rank reduction）方法。该方法在训练完成后对模型进行简单介入，不需要额外的参数或数据，并通过广泛的实验证明其在语言模型和数据集上的普遍适用性，同时提供了深入的分析来揭示 LASER 的有效性和运作机制。