# Evaluating the Impact of Compression Techniques on Task-Specific Performance of Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.11233 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11233/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10560/) (2022)
- [The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis: Finding Sparse, Trainable Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03635/) (2018)
- [Learning both Weights and Connections for Efficient Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02626/) (2015)
- [GPTQ: Accurate Post-Training Quantization for Generative Pre-trained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.17323/) (2022)
- [Chatbot Arena: An Open Platform for Evaluating LLMs by Human Preference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04132/) (2024)
- [SparseGPT: Massive Language Models Can Be Accurately Pruned in One-Shot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00774/) (2023)
- [Unnatural Instructions: Tuning Language Models with (Almost) No Human Labor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09689/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Knowledge Distillation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13116/) (2024)
- [Challenges and Applications of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10169/) (2023)
- [Generating Benchmarks for Factuality Evaluation of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06908/) (2023)
- [Open-LLM-Leaderboard: From Multi-choice to Open-style Questions for LLMs Evaluation, Benchmark, and Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07545/) (2024)
- [Model Compression and Efficient Inference for Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09748/) (2024)
- [Compressing LLMs: The Truth is Rarely Pure and Never Simple](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01382/) (2023)
- [Can Perplexity Reflect Large Language Model's Ability in Long Text Understanding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06105/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Beware of Calibration Data for Pruning Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17711/) (2024)
- [Preserving LLM Capabilities through Calibration Data Curation: From Analysis to Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10618/) (2025)
- [Activation- and Influence-Aware Ranks (AIR): Function-Preserving SVD Compression for LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19993/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models (LLMs) offer powerful capabilities but incur substantial computational costs, driving the need for efficient compression techniques. This study evaluates the impact of popular compression methods - Magnitude Pruning, SparseGPT, and Wanda - on the LLaMA-2-7B model, focusing on the trade-offs between model size reduction, downstream task performance, and the role of calibration data. Our findings reveal that while SparseGPT and Wanda preserve perplexity even at 50% sparsity, they suffer significant degradation on downstream tasks, highlighting the inadequacy of perplexity as the sole evaluation metric. To address this, we introduce Jensen-Shannon (JS) Divergence as a more comprehensive metric that captures nuanced changes in model behavior post-compression. We further demonstrate that task-specific calibration data significantly enhances the downstream performance of compressed models compared to general calibration data. This research underscores the necessity for diverse evaluation metrics and careful calibration data selection to fully understand the complexities of LLM compression and its implications for practical applications.