# Adaptive Model Compression (AMC): Saliency-Driven Resource Allocation for Ultra-Low-Power Transformer Inference

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10109 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.10109/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 16 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Deep Compression: Compressing Deep Neural Networks with Pruning, Trained Quantization and Huffman Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.00149/) (2015)
- [Efficient Streaming Language Models with Attention Sinks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17453/) (2023)
- [LLM.int8(): 8-bit Matrix Multiplication for Transformers at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.07339/) (2022)
- [DynamicViT: Efficient Vision Transformers with Dynamic Token Sparsification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02034/) (2021)
- [Quest: Query-Aware Sparsity for Efficient Long-Context LLM Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10774/) (2024)
- [Efficient Processing of Deep Neural Networks: A Tutorial and Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.09039/) (2017)
- [EIE: Efficient Inference Engine on Compressed Deep Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.01528/) (2016)
- [Token-Importance Guided Direct Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19653/) (2025)
- [Energy-Efficient ConvNets Through Approximate Computing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06777/) (2016)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deploying large-scale transformer models on resource-constrained edge devices remains a challenge due to the high energy and memory overhead inherent in static inference, which processes simple and complex tokens with uniform intensity. To address this, we propose Adaptive Model Compression (AMC), a saliency-driven framework that dynamically allocates hardware resources based on token importance. By implementing a multi-tier architecture, our system identifies critical high-saliency information for full-precision processing while aggressively reducing the rank and bit-width of less significant data. Experimental results demonstrate that AMC achieves a 59.2% reduction in system energy and a 2.24x increase in throughput on 45nm CMOS hardware. This approach effectively extends the battery life of mobile devices by utilizing high-definition compute only where necessary, maintaining robust performance with a marginal 3.6% accuracy trade-off.
