# Variational autoencoder-based neural network model compression

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.14513 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14513/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 14 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Aug 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Learning both Weights and Connections for Efficient Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02626/) (2015)
- [Advances in Variational Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05597/) (2017)
- [Quantized Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.06473/) (2015)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Neural Weight Compression for Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11234/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), as a form of deep generative model, have been widely used in recent years, and shown great great peformance in a number of different domains, including image generation and anomaly detection, etc.. This paper aims to explore neural network model compression method based on VAE. The experiment uses different neural network models for MNIST recognition as compression targets, including Feedforward Neural Network (FNN), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM). These models are the most basic models in deep learning, and other more complex and advanced models are based on them or inherit their features and evolve. In the experiment, the first step is to train the models mentioned above, each trained model will have different accuracy and number of total parameters. And then the variants of parameters for each model are processed as training data in VAEs separately, and the trained VAEs are tested by the true model parameters. The experimental results show that using the latent space as a representation of the model compression can improve the compression rate compared to some traditional methods such as pruning and quantization, meanwhile the accuracy is not greatly affected using the model parameters reconstructed based on the latent space. In the future, a variety of different large-scale deep learning models will be used more widely, so exploring different ways to save time and space on saving or transferring models will become necessary, and the use of VAE in this paper can provide a basis for these further explorations.