ASVD: Activation-aware Singular Value Decomposition for Compressing Large Language Models

This paper explores a new post-hoc training-free compression paradigm for compressing Large Language Models (LLMs) to facilitate their wider adoption in various computing environments. We delve into the challenges of LLM compression, notably their dependency on extensive training data and computational resources. We propose a training-free approach dubbed Activation-aware Singular Value Decomposition (ASVD) to address these limitations. ASVD effectively manages activation outliers by adjusting the weight matrix based on the activation distribution, improving decomposition accuracy and efficiency. Our method also addresses the varying sensitivity of different LLM layers to decomposition, with an iterative calibration process for optimal layer-specific decomposition. Experiments demonstrate that ASVD can compress network by 10%-20% without losing reasoning capacities. Additionally, it can be seamlessly integrated with other LLM compression paradigms, showcasing its flexible compatibility. Code and compressed models are available at https://github.com/hahnyuan/ASVD4LLM.