Efficient Model Compression for Edge Devices

The field of model compression is moving towards developing innovative techniques to reduce the size and computational requirements of large language models and other deep learning models, enabling their deployment on resource-constrained edge devices. Researchers are exploring various methods, including quantization, knowledge distillation, and pruning, to achieve high compression ratios while maintaining acceptable performance. Notably, the use of advanced quantization techniques, such as convolutional code quantization and post-training quantization, has shown promising results in reducing model size and inference cost. Additionally, the integration of model compression techniques with specialized edge hardware, such as analog in-memory computing chips, is being investigated to further improve computational efficiency. Noteworthy papers include: EdgeCodec, which presents a lightweight neural compressor for barometric data that achieves high compression rates while maintaining low reconstruction error. CCQ, which proposes a convolutional code quantization approach that compresses large language models to extremely low bit widths with minimal accuracy loss.

Sources

EdgeCodec: Onboard Lightweight High Fidelity Neural Compressor with Residual Vector Quantization

QS4D: Quantization-aware training for efficient hardware deployment of structured state-space sequential models

CCQ: Convolutional Code for Extreme Low-bit Quantization in LLMs

Exploring the Limits of Model Compression in LLMs: A Knowledge Distillation Study on QA Tasks

Edge-ASR: Towards Low-Bit Quantization of Automatic Speech Recognition Models

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