This note provides a personal mathematical deep-dive into unstructured pruning methods. I first cover one-shot methods including Optimal Brain Surgeon, SparseGPT, and Wanda, followed by training-based approaches such as Movement Pruning and oBERT. To my knowledge, this is a unique synthesis that provides both rigorous mathematical derivations and explicit connections between these disparate frameworks.

Download: unstructured-pruning-methods.pdf