arXiv Machine Learning By Borja Aizpurua, Sukhbinder Singh, Rom\'an Or\'us

Weight Clustering Reveals the Importance of Relative Rank in Large Language Models

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The study demonstrates that large language models can be compressed by clustering weight matrices into only 16–64 shared values without retraining, preserving strong accuracy. Fine‑tuning the cluster centroids recovers most of the remaining accuracy loss. Analysis reveals that maintaining the relative rank of weights and their overall variance is crucial for performance, while early layers and spatial geometry of cluster assignments also play significant roles.

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