Can Compressed LLMs Truly Act? An Empirical Evaluation of Agentic Capabilities in LLM Compression

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Main Authors: Dong, Peijie, Tang, Zhenheng, Liu, Xiang, Li, Lujun, Chu, Xiaowen, Li, Bo
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Dong, Peijie
Tang, Zhenheng
Liu, Xiang
Li, Lujun
Chu, Xiaowen
Li, Bo
author_facet Dong, Peijie
Tang, Zhenheng
Liu, Xiang
Li, Lujun
Chu, Xiaowen
Li, Bo
contents Post-training compression reduces the computational and memory costs of large language models (LLMs), enabling resource-efficient deployment. However, existing compression benchmarks only focus on language modeling (e.g., perplexity) and natural language understanding tasks (e.g., GLUE accuracy), ignoring the agentic capabilities - workflow, tool use/function call, long-context understanding and real-world application. We introduce the Agent Compression Benchmark (ACBench), the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating how compression impacts LLMs' agentic abilities. ACBench spans (1) 12 tasks across 4 capabilities (e.g., WorfBench for workflow generation, Needle-in-Haystack for long-context retrieval), (2) quantization (GPTQ, AWQ) and pruning (Wanda, SparseGPT), and (3) 15 models, including small (Gemma-2B), standard (Qwen2.5 7B-32B), and distilled reasoning LLMs (DeepSeek-R1-Distill). Our experiments reveal compression tradeoffs: 4-bit quantization preserves workflow generation and tool use (1%-3% drop) but degrades real-world application accuracy by 10%-15%. We introduce ERank, Top-k Ranking Correlation and Energy to systematize analysis. ACBench provides actionable insights for optimizing LLM compression in agentic scenarios. The code can be found in https://github.com/pprp/ACBench.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_19433
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Can Compressed LLMs Truly Act? An Empirical Evaluation of Agentic Capabilities in LLM Compression
Dong, Peijie
Tang, Zhenheng
Liu, Xiang
Li, Lujun
Chu, Xiaowen
Li, Bo
Machine Learning
Post-training compression reduces the computational and memory costs of large language models (LLMs), enabling resource-efficient deployment. However, existing compression benchmarks only focus on language modeling (e.g., perplexity) and natural language understanding tasks (e.g., GLUE accuracy), ignoring the agentic capabilities - workflow, tool use/function call, long-context understanding and real-world application. We introduce the Agent Compression Benchmark (ACBench), the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating how compression impacts LLMs' agentic abilities. ACBench spans (1) 12 tasks across 4 capabilities (e.g., WorfBench for workflow generation, Needle-in-Haystack for long-context retrieval), (2) quantization (GPTQ, AWQ) and pruning (Wanda, SparseGPT), and (3) 15 models, including small (Gemma-2B), standard (Qwen2.5 7B-32B), and distilled reasoning LLMs (DeepSeek-R1-Distill). Our experiments reveal compression tradeoffs: 4-bit quantization preserves workflow generation and tool use (1%-3% drop) but degrades real-world application accuracy by 10%-15%. We introduce ERank, Top-k Ranking Correlation and Energy to systematize analysis. ACBench provides actionable insights for optimizing LLM compression in agentic scenarios. The code can be found in https://github.com/pprp/ACBench.
title Can Compressed LLMs Truly Act? An Empirical Evaluation of Agentic Capabilities in LLM Compression
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.19433