arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28

LowRankArena: A Standardized Evaluation Platform for SVD-Based LLM Compression

LowRankArena is a standardized evaluation platform for SVD‑based low‑rank compression of large language models, unifying task versions, compression budgets, comparison regimes, and inference measurements. It provides a reproducible pipeline with over 3 TiB of released compressed checkpoints, enabling consistent comparisons across methods. An audit of five representative SVD techniques using LowRankArena shows that prior reported gains are highly conditional, with performance leaders and tiers shifting across backbones and keep ratios, and that nominal low‑rank savings often yield limited end‑to‑end speedups.

By Zishan Shao, Lixun Zhang, Kangning Cui, Wenhao Wu, Jinhee Kim, Yixiao Wang, Ting Jiang, Hancheng Ye, Qinsi Wang, Fan Yang, Danyang Zhuo, Yiran Chen, Hai Li
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Mind the Approximation: Fisher-Weighted SVD Compression for ViTs

The paper introduces FACTS, a structured Fisher Approximation for compressing Vision Transformers (ViTs) using Fisher-weighted SVD, which enforces token‑local aggregation while preserving within‑token activation‑gradient dependence. It also presents Constrained Rank Search (CoRS) to optimize layer‑wise rank allocation under a fixed FLOP budget. Experiments on ViTs and hybrid architectures show that FACTS improves accuracy‑efficiency trade‑offs, outperforming the strongest SVD baseline by up to +5.8 percentage points on Swin‑B without requiring finetuning.

By Moritz Thoma, Maximilian Groezinger, Maximilian Forstenh\"ausler, Emad Aghajanzadeh, Ryan Pegoud, Manoj Rohit Vemparala, Pierpaolo Mori, Alexander Frickenstein, Daniel Mueller-Gritschneder, Ulf Schlichtmann