Frequency Matters: Fast Model-Agnostic Data Curation for Pruning and Quantization

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Monaco, Francesco Pio, Cunegatti, Elia, Vella, Flavio, Iacca, Giovanni
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Monaco, Francesco Pio
Cunegatti, Elia
Vella, Flavio
Iacca, Giovanni
author_facet Monaco, Francesco Pio
Cunegatti, Elia
Vella, Flavio
Iacca, Giovanni
contents Post-training model compression is essential for enhancing the portability of Large Language Models (LLMs) while preserving their performance. While several compression approaches have been proposed, less emphasis has been placed on selecting the most suitable set of data (the so-called \emph{calibration data}) for finding the compressed model configuration. The choice of calibration data is a critical step in preserving model capabilities both intra- and inter-tasks. In this work, we address the challenge of identifying high-performance calibration sets for both pruning and quantization by analyzing intrinsic data properties rather than model-specific signals. We introduce \texttt{\textbf{ZipCal}}, a model-agnostic data curation strategy that maximizes lexical diversity based on Zipfian power laws. Experiments demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms standard uniform random sampling across various pruning benchmarks. Notably, it also performs on par, in terms of downstream performance, with a state-of-the-art method that relies on model perplexity. The latter becomes prohibitively expensive at large-scale models and datasets, while \texttt{\textbf{ZipCal}} is on average $\sim$240$\times$ faster due to its tractable linear complexity\footnote{We make the code and the experiments available at https://github.com/FrancescoMonaco/ZipCal.}.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_16105
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Frequency Matters: Fast Model-Agnostic Data Curation for Pruning and Quantization
Monaco, Francesco Pio
Cunegatti, Elia
Vella, Flavio
Iacca, Giovanni
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
I.2.7
Post-training model compression is essential for enhancing the portability of Large Language Models (LLMs) while preserving their performance. While several compression approaches have been proposed, less emphasis has been placed on selecting the most suitable set of data (the so-called \emph{calibration data}) for finding the compressed model configuration. The choice of calibration data is a critical step in preserving model capabilities both intra- and inter-tasks. In this work, we address the challenge of identifying high-performance calibration sets for both pruning and quantization by analyzing intrinsic data properties rather than model-specific signals. We introduce \texttt{\textbf{ZipCal}}, a model-agnostic data curation strategy that maximizes lexical diversity based on Zipfian power laws. Experiments demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms standard uniform random sampling across various pruning benchmarks. Notably, it also performs on par, in terms of downstream performance, with a state-of-the-art method that relies on model perplexity. The latter becomes prohibitively expensive at large-scale models and datasets, while \texttt{\textbf{ZipCal}} is on average $\sim$240$\times$ faster due to its tractable linear complexity\footnote{We make the code and the experiments available at https://github.com/FrancescoMonaco/ZipCal.}.
title Frequency Matters: Fast Model-Agnostic Data Curation for Pruning and Quantization
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
I.2.7
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.16105