LOOP: Recovery-Aligned Iterative Layer Pruning via On-Policy Distillation

Liang Xu, Shufan Shen, Zhongni Hou, Yufei Zhang, Wei Lin +2

Layer-level pruning is attractive for large language model (LLM) deployment as it reduces the model size while preserving a dense architecture that can be efficiently executed on standard hardware. Current methods typically follow a one-shot paradigm, which first removes selected layers to reach a target model size and then performs additional training to recover model capabilities. However, pruning directly to the target size can substantially degrade reasoning capabilities, making subsequent recovery more difficult under a limited training budget. Moreover, this paradigm separates layer selection from recovery, limiting the use of recovery information to guide selection and potentially hindering the recovery of reasoning capabilities. To address these limitations, we propose LOOP, a Layer-level Recovery-Oriented On-Policy Pruning framework that interleaves pruning and recovery across multiple shots. In each shot, LOOP removes a single layer and performs short on-policy distillation, mitigating the abrupt degradation in reasoning capabilities associated with one-shot pruning. To guide layer selection in subsequent shots, LOOP reuses on-policy trajectories and optimization…