Low-Rank Prehab: Preparing Neural Networks for SVD Compression

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Qin, Haoran, Sharma, Shansita, Abbasi, Ali, Thrash, Chayne, Kolouri, Soheil
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866918226117525504
author Qin, Haoran
Sharma, Shansita
Abbasi, Ali
Thrash, Chayne
Kolouri, Soheil
author_facet Qin, Haoran
Sharma, Shansita
Abbasi, Ali
Thrash, Chayne
Kolouri, Soheil
contents Low-rank approximation methods such as singular value decomposition (SVD) and its variants (e.g., Fisher-weighted SVD, Activation SVD) have recently emerged as effective tools for neural network compression. In this setting, decomposition acts as a "surgical" intervention, followed by fine-tuning that serves as "rehab" to recover accuracy. Inspired by prehabilitation in surgery, we introduce a pre-compression fine-tuning stage, Low-Rank Prehab, that explicitly encourages low-rank structure in weight matrices while preserving task performance. By conditioning the model before SVD, Prehab steers weights toward spectrally compact regions of the parameter space, enabling smoother low-rank approximation and improved recovery. Experiments on large language models (LLMs) and other Transformer-based architectures, including Vision Transformers (ViTs), show that Prehab substantially reduces the immediate accuracy drop after compression and consistently improves post-finetuning performance. Across a wide range of compression ratios, our method outperforms state-of-the-art SVD-based techniques such as SVD-LLM, highlighting the importance of preparing models for compression rather than only improving the compression and recovery stages. Source code is available at https://github.com/niqretnuh/PREHAB-SVD
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_01980
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Low-Rank Prehab: Preparing Neural Networks for SVD Compression
Qin, Haoran
Sharma, Shansita
Abbasi, Ali
Thrash, Chayne
Kolouri, Soheil
Machine Learning
Low-rank approximation methods such as singular value decomposition (SVD) and its variants (e.g., Fisher-weighted SVD, Activation SVD) have recently emerged as effective tools for neural network compression. In this setting, decomposition acts as a "surgical" intervention, followed by fine-tuning that serves as "rehab" to recover accuracy. Inspired by prehabilitation in surgery, we introduce a pre-compression fine-tuning stage, Low-Rank Prehab, that explicitly encourages low-rank structure in weight matrices while preserving task performance. By conditioning the model before SVD, Prehab steers weights toward spectrally compact regions of the parameter space, enabling smoother low-rank approximation and improved recovery. Experiments on large language models (LLMs) and other Transformer-based architectures, including Vision Transformers (ViTs), show that Prehab substantially reduces the immediate accuracy drop after compression and consistently improves post-finetuning performance. Across a wide range of compression ratios, our method outperforms state-of-the-art SVD-based techniques such as SVD-LLM, highlighting the importance of preparing models for compression rather than only improving the compression and recovery stages. Source code is available at https://github.com/niqretnuh/PREHAB-SVD
title Low-Rank Prehab: Preparing Neural Networks for SVD Compression
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.01980