What Breaks Under Pruning in Smart Homes, and When? Evaluating LLM Degradation Across Architectures and Task Complexity
Pruning study across four LLM architectures finds dense models degrade sharply on smart-home tool calling while MoE models tolerate far more.
Researchers systematically study pruning-induced degradation in smart-home tool calling across four LLMs spanning dense Transformer, dense hybrid, and mixture-of-experts architectures, combining depth, width, hybrid, and expert pruning methods, and evaluate over 19,500 instances from three datasets after post-pruning supervised fine-tuning. Dense models show narrow safe pruning regions followed by sharp degradation, while MoE models tolerate substantially more pruning. Pruning degrades grounded specificity (operation, device, argument, value) before schema-level intent, and aggressive dense pruning can induce systematic over-refusal.