# Does Compression Preserve Uncertainty? A Unified Benchmark for Quantized and Sparse LLMs via Conformal Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.01850 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.01850/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 55 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02142/) (2015)
- [HellaSwag: Can a Machine Really Finish Your Sentence?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07830/) (2019)
- [Simple and Scalable Predictive Uncertainty Estimation using Deep Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01474/) (2016)
- [QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14314/) (2023)
- [GPTQ: Accurate Post-Training Quantization for Generative Pre-trained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.17323/) (2022)
- [Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Know](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05221/) (2022)
- [SmoothQuant: Accurate and Efficient Post-Training Quantization for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10438/) (2022)
- [AWQ: Activation-aware Weight Quantization for LLM Compression and Acceleration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00978/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Evaluation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03109/) (2023)
- [SparseGPT: Massive Language Models Can Be Accurately Pruned in One-Shot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00774/) (2023)
- [Semantic Uncertainty: Linguistic Invariances for Uncertainty Estimation in Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09664/) (2023)
- [A Simple and Effective Pruning Approach for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11695/) (2023)
- [Evidential Deep Learning to Quantify Classification Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01768/) (2018)
- [LLM-Pruner: On the Structural Pruning of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11627/) (2023)
- [DeepSeek LLM: Scaling Open-Source Language Models with Longtermism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02954/) (2024)
- [QuaRot: Outlier-Free 4-Bit Inference in Rotated LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00456/) (2024)
- [The Falcon Series of Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16867/) (2023)
- [SpinQuant: LLM quantization with learned rotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16406/) (2024)
- [OmniQuant: Omnidirectionally Calibrated Quantization for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13137/) (2023)
- [Classification with Valid and Adaptive Coverage](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.02544/) (2020)
- [Revisiting the Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07998/) (2021)
- [SliceGPT: Compress Large Language Models by Deleting Rows and Columns](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15024/) (2024)
- [HaluEval: A Large-Scale Hallucination Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11747/) (2023)
- [Cosmos QA: Machine Reading Comprehension with Contextual Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00277/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Lottery Tickets Are Not Deployment Tickets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.27031/) (2026)
- [Uncertainty Quantification for LLM Agents: A Taxonomy, an Evaluation Protocol, and an Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.07395/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Model compression techniques such as quantization and pruning are widely used to reduce the deployment cost of large language models (LLMs), with existing evaluations focusing almost exclusively on accuracy preservation. However, in safety-critical applications, a model's ability to reliably quantify its own uncertainty is equally important. We ask: does compression preserve this ability? To answer this question, we benchmark 12 LLMs under various compression configurations across five NLP tasks, using conformal prediction to provide a rigorous, distribution-free measure of uncertainty. Our experiments reveal that: (I) compression frequently decouples accuracy from uncertainty; (II) larger models absorb compression-induced uncertainty far more effectively than smaller ones; and (III) uncertainty inflation is often threshold-like rather than gradual. These results suggest that accuracy-only evaluation is insufficient for assessing the deployment readiness of compressed LLMs, and that uncertainty-aware benchmarking should be a standard component of model compression pipelines.