Papers › Forget the Data and Fine-Tuning! Just Fold the Network to Compress

Forget the Data and Fine-Tuning! Just Fold the Network to Compress

14 Feb 2025arXiv:2502.10216archive 2025-07-28

Dong Wang, Haris Šikić, Lothar Thiele, Olga Saukh

We introduce model folding, a novel data-free model compression technique that merges structurally similar neurons across layers, significantly reducing the model size without the need for fine-tuning or access to training data. Unlike existing methods, model folding preserves data statistics during compression by leveraging k-means clustering, and using novel data-free techniques to prevent variance collapse or explosion. Our theoretical framework and experiments across standard benchmarks, including ResNet18 and LLaMA-7B, demonstrate that model folding achieves comparable performance to data-driven compression techniques and outperforms recently proposed data-free methods, especially at high sparsity levels. This approach is particularly effective for compressing large-scale models, making it suitable for deployment in resource-constrained environments.

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