BLISS Speaker Series Episode #16

BLISS is delighted to welcome Dr Martin Genzel, Senior Research Engineer at Merantix Momentum, who will give a 45-minute talk entitled ‘Can Compressing Foundation Models be as Easy as Image Compression?’. Following the talk, attendees will have the opportunity to mingle with other AI enthusiasts, share ideas, ask questions and enjoy complimentary drinks. Doors will close at 7:15pm, so early arrival is highly recommended.

Please note that RSVPing through Meetup is essential to guarantee attendance. Although Meetup has been actively promoting its Plus programme recently, it is not necessary to purchase this - both the platform and BLISS events are still completely free.

Abstract: The widespread adoption of Foundation Models, especially LLMs, is often hindered by their substantial size and computational demands, especially in resource-limited settings. While post-training compression offers a promising avenue to mitigate these challenges, the process can feel like a "black box" for the user, requiring significant expertise and trial-and-error to find the right balance between model size and performance. This talk introduces Any Compression via Iterative Pruning (ACIP), a novel algorithmic approach designed with the user in mind. ACIP allows for intuitive and direct control over the compression-performance trade-off, akin to compressing an image. It leverages a single gradient descent run of iterative pruning to establish a global parameter ranking, from which models of any target size can be immediately materialized. ACIP demonstrates strong predictive performance on downstream tasks without costly fine-tuning. Across various open-weight LLMs, it achieves state-of-the-art compression results compared to existing factorization-based methods. Moreover, it seamlessly complements common quantization techniques for even greater compression.