Related papers: The Cost of Compression: Investigating the Impact of Compression on Parametric Knowledge in Language Models

The Cost of Compression: Investigating the Impact of Compression on Parametric Knowledge in Language Models

URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2312.00960v1
Date: Fri, 1 Dec 2023 22:27:12 GMT
Title: The Cost of Compression: Investigating the Impact of Compression on Parametric Knowledge in Language Models
Authors: Satya Sai Srinath Namburi, Makesh Sreedhar, Srinath Srinivasan, Frederic Sala
Abstract summary: Large language models (LLMs) provide faster inference, smaller memory footprints, and enables local deployment. Two standard compression techniques are pruning and quantization, with the former eliminating redundant connections in model layers and the latter representing model parameters with fewer bits. Existing research on LLM compression primarily focuses on performance in terms of general metrics like perplexity or downstream task accuracy. More fine-grained metrics, such as those measuring parametric knowledge, remain significantly underexplored.
Score: 11.156816338995503
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Abstract: Compressing large language models (LLMs), often consisting of billions of parameters, provides faster inference, smaller memory footprints, and enables local deployment. Two standard compression techniques are pruning and quantization, with the former eliminating redundant connections in model layers and the latter representing model parameters with fewer bits. The key tradeoff is between the degree of compression and the impact on the quality of the compressed model. Existing research on LLM compression primarily focuses on performance in terms of general metrics like perplexity or downstream task accuracy. More fine-grained metrics, such as those measuring parametric knowledge, remain significantly underexplored. To help bridge this gap, we present a comprehensive analysis across multiple model families (ENCODER, ENCODER-DECODER, and DECODER) using the LAMA and LM-HARNESS benchmarks in order to systematically quantify the effect of commonly employed compression techniques on model performance. A particular focus is on tradeoffs involving parametric knowledge, with the goal of providing practitioners with practical insights to help make informed decisions on compression. We release our codebase1 to enable further research.