UltraSketchLLM: Saliency-Driven Sketching for Ultra-Low Bit LLM Compression

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zou, Sunan, Zhang, Ziyun, Sun, Xueting, Luo, Guojie
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zou, Sunan
Zhang, Ziyun
Sun, Xueting
Luo, Guojie
author_facet Zou, Sunan
Zhang, Ziyun
Sun, Xueting
Luo, Guojie
contents The rapid growth of large language models (LLMs) has outpaced the memory constraints of edge devices, necessitating extreme weight compression beyond the 1-bit limit. While quantization reduces model size, it is fundamentally limited to 1 bit per weight. Existing multiple-to-one compression methods either rely on mapping tables (inducing memory overhead) or incur severe accuracy degradation due to random weight grouping. We introduce UltraSketchLLM, an index-free, sketch-based framework that achieves ultra-low bit compression (down to 0.5 bits per weight) while preserving model performance. UltraSketchLLM leverages data sketching, a sub-linear representation technique from streaming applications, to map multiple weights to single values with bounded error. Our approach integrates an underestimate AbsMaxMin sketch to minimize relative errors for small weights, importance-aware space allocation to prioritize salient weights, and a straight-through estimator for compression-aware finetuning. Experiments on Llama-3.2-1B demonstrate up to 0.5-bit compression with competitive perplexity, alongside tolerable latency overhead. UltraSketchLLM offers a practical solution for deploying LLMs in resource-constrained environments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_17255
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle UltraSketchLLM: Saliency-Driven Sketching for Ultra-Low Bit LLM Compression
Zou, Sunan
Zhang, Ziyun
Sun, Xueting
Luo, Guojie
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
The rapid growth of large language models (LLMs) has outpaced the memory constraints of edge devices, necessitating extreme weight compression beyond the 1-bit limit. While quantization reduces model size, it is fundamentally limited to 1 bit per weight. Existing multiple-to-one compression methods either rely on mapping tables (inducing memory overhead) or incur severe accuracy degradation due to random weight grouping. We introduce UltraSketchLLM, an index-free, sketch-based framework that achieves ultra-low bit compression (down to 0.5 bits per weight) while preserving model performance. UltraSketchLLM leverages data sketching, a sub-linear representation technique from streaming applications, to map multiple weights to single values with bounded error. Our approach integrates an underestimate AbsMaxMin sketch to minimize relative errors for small weights, importance-aware space allocation to prioritize salient weights, and a straight-through estimator for compression-aware finetuning. Experiments on Llama-3.2-1B demonstrate up to 0.5-bit compression with competitive perplexity, alongside tolerable latency overhead. UltraSketchLLM offers a practical solution for deploying LLMs in resource-constrained environments.
title UltraSketchLLM: Saliency-Driven Sketching for Ultra-Low Bit LLM Compression
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.17255