arXiv Machine Learning

Activation-Aware Weight Tensorization: A Calibration-Time Preconditioner for Tensor-Network LLM Compression

Activation-Aware Weight Tensorization (AWT) is a training‑free calibration wrapper that preconditions each weight matrix with a diagonal activation‑derived scale before applying standard Tensor Train (TT) or Tree Tensor Network (TTN) decompositions. By adding only an input‑side elementwise rescaling, AWT improves functional fidelity of post‑training tensor‑network compression across several large language models (Llama 3.1 8B, Ministral 8B, Qwen2.5 7B) at 2–6× compression, closing a significant portion of the perplexity gap to dense baselines and enhancing downstream task performance. The method demonstrates that diagonal preconditioning offers a robustness‑modularity trade‑off, outperforming full‑covariance oracles in many cases while remaining modular and solver‑agnostic.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

Dense Structural Compression of Transformers via Gauge-Correct Channel Removal

The paper introduces GaugeLasso, a method that applies symmetric group‑lasso penalties to transformer channels during training, enabling entire tensor slices to be zeroed out while maintaining dense tensors for GPU efficiency. By calibrating channel penalties based on inference utility per compute, the network self‑organizes into depth‑dependent structural profiles that can be dramatically smaller than the original architecture, achieving up to 255‑fold compression on a polynomial division task and outperforming hand‑designed baselines on language modeling and autoencoding benchmarks. The approach also accelerates training and reveals over‑provisioned axes that guide subsequent design iterations.

By Jed A. Duersch, Na\"im Es-Sebbani, Nathana\"el Haas, Zied Bouraoui
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 1

Learning Functional Subspaces for Neural Network Compression

arXiv:2609.40127v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern transformers pair impressive capabilities with substantial memory and compute demands. Low-rank weight factorization reduces both while keepin...

By Massimo Bini, Anders Christensen, Stephan Alaniz, Judah Goldfeder, Ole Winther, Yann LeCun, Ravid Shwartz-Ziv, Zeynep Akata
arXiv Machine Learning
2d ago

COMPOT: Calibration-Optimized Matrix Procrustes Orthogonalization for Transformers Compression

COMPOT is a training‑free compression framework for transformer models that uses a small calibration dataset to estimate a sparse weight factorization. It employs orthogonal dictionaries, enabling closed‑form Procrustes updates and analytical single‑step sparse coding, which dramatically reduces optimization cost. The method also introduces a one‑shot dynamic allocation strategy to adaptively redistribute compression rates across layers, achieving a superior quality‑compression trade‑off compared to strong low‑rank and sparse baselines while remaining compatible with post‑training quantization.

By Denis Makhov, Dmitriy Shopkhoev, Magauiya Zhussip, Ammar Ali, Baher Mohammad, Stamatios Lefkimmiatis
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

LILA: Calibration-Free Structured Pruning of Large Language Models via Latent Spectral Geometry

LILA (Latent-Informed Layer Analysis) introduces a calibration‑free method for structured pruning of large language models by scoring neuron importance using the Kolmogorov–Smirnov distance between singular value distributions of full and neuron‑ablated feed‑forward network weight matrices. The approach requires no training, calibration data, or auxiliary networks, and outperforms existing methods such as PruneNet and SliceGPT on LLaMA‑2‑7B and Phi‑2 at various sparsity levels. After a single epoch of LoRA fine‑tuning, LILA matches heavily calibrated baselines, and a Neural Tangent Kernel analysis provides theoretical support for its spectral importance criterion. Additionally, LILA can dynamically allocate sparsity budgets, achieving state‑of‑the‑art generative preservation and revealing architectural bottlenecks at higher compression.

By Sankar Behera, Dhruv Singh, Anshika Agnihotri, Raj Kumar Choudhary, Satyadev Ahlawat, Yamuna Prasad
arXiv AI
Oct 2

ITC-MoE: Importance-guided Token-aware Compression for MoE Diffusion Language Models

ITC-MoE introduces an Importance-guided Token-aware Compression framework for Mixture-of-Experts Diffusion Language Models. It combines Adaptive Tucker Compression, which uses activation and gradient importance to jointly factorize expert weights and allocate ranks, with Token-aware Compensation and Routing that applies low‑rank adjustments to hot tokens and limits expert candidates for cold tokens. The method achieves significant reductions in computation and storage while maintaining generation quality, exemplified by a 30% compression budget that preserves 96.33% accuracy on MultiArith and delivers up to a 7.22× speedup.

By Lianjun Liu, Shipeng Li, You Huang, Weiqi Yan, Mingte Qiu, Huazhong Liu, Xiaofeng Zhu, Yunshan Zhong