DeltaLLM: Compress LLMs with Low-Rank Deltas between Shared Weights

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Mikaelyan, Liana, Imani, Ayyoob, Salvaris, Mathew, Pathak, Parth, Fayyaz, Mohsen
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Mikaelyan, Liana
Imani, Ayyoob
Salvaris, Mathew
Pathak, Parth
Fayyaz, Mohsen
author_facet Mikaelyan, Liana
Imani, Ayyoob
Salvaris, Mathew
Pathak, Parth
Fayyaz, Mohsen
contents We introduce DeltaLLM, a new post-training compression technique to reduce the memory footprint of LLMs. We propose an alternative way of structuring LLMs with weight sharing between layers in subsequent Transformer blocks, along with additional low-rank difference matrices between them. For training, we adopt the progressing module replacement method and show that the lightweight training of the low-rank modules with approximately 30M-40M tokens is sufficient to achieve performance on par with LLMs of comparable sizes trained from scratch. We release the resultant models, DeltaLLAMA and DeltaPHI, with a 12% parameter reduction, retaining 90% of the performance of the base Llama and Phi models on common knowledge and reasoning benchmarks. Our method also outperforms compression techniques JointDrop, LaCo, ShortGPT and SliceGPT with the same number of parameters removed. For example, DeltaPhi 2.9B with a 24% reduction achieves similar average zero-shot accuracies as recovery fine-tuned SlicedPhi 3.3B with a 12% reduction, despite being approximately 400M parameters smaller with no fine-tuning applied. This work provides new insights into LLM architecture design and compression methods when storage space is critical.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_18596
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DeltaLLM: Compress LLMs with Low-Rank Deltas between Shared Weights
Mikaelyan, Liana
Imani, Ayyoob
Salvaris, Mathew
Pathak, Parth
Fayyaz, Mohsen
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
We introduce DeltaLLM, a new post-training compression technique to reduce the memory footprint of LLMs. We propose an alternative way of structuring LLMs with weight sharing between layers in subsequent Transformer blocks, along with additional low-rank difference matrices between them. For training, we adopt the progressing module replacement method and show that the lightweight training of the low-rank modules with approximately 30M-40M tokens is sufficient to achieve performance on par with LLMs of comparable sizes trained from scratch. We release the resultant models, DeltaLLAMA and DeltaPHI, with a 12% parameter reduction, retaining 90% of the performance of the base Llama and Phi models on common knowledge and reasoning benchmarks. Our method also outperforms compression techniques JointDrop, LaCo, ShortGPT and SliceGPT with the same number of parameters removed. For example, DeltaPhi 2.9B with a 24% reduction achieves similar average zero-shot accuracies as recovery fine-tuned SlicedPhi 3.3B with a 12% reduction, despite being approximately 400M parameters smaller with no fine-tuning applied. This work provides new insights into LLM architecture design and compression methods when storage space is critical.
title DeltaLLM: Compress LLMs with Low-Rank Deltas between Shared Weights
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.18596