Challenge: Quantization, knowledge distillation, and magnitude pruning are among the most popular methods for neural network compression in NLP.
Approach: They compare accuracy vs. model size tradeoffs using quantization and distillation methods . they find that pruning provides greater benefit than quantization .
Outcome: The proposed methods reduce model size and can accelerate inference, but their relative benefit and combinatorial interactions have not been rigorously studied.

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Challenge: Recent advances in hardware, modeling, and optimization for deep neural networks have led to improvements in memory and inference efficiency.
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Challenge: Recent studies have focused on compressing pre-trained language models (PLMs) however, few studies have examined the impact of compression on generalizability and robustness of compressed models for out-of-distribution data.
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The Cost of Compression: Investigating the Impact of Compression on Parametric Knowledge in Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing research on LLM compression focuses on general metrics like perplexity or downstream task accuracy.
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Compression of Generative Pre-trained Language Models via Quantization (2022.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods to compress generative pre-trained language models fail on generative tasks due to homogeneous word embeddings and limited memory.
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Structured Pruning Learns Compact and Accurate Models (2022.acl-long)

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Challenge: Pre-trained language models have high costs in terms of storage, memory, and computation time.
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Challenge: Popular pre-trained Transformers have improved performance for various NLP tasks by sizable margins, but are too resource-hungry and computation-intensive to suit low-capacity devices or applications with strict latency requirements.
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Revisiting Pruning vs Quantization for Small Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Compressing Small Language Models (SLMs) is particularly suited for resource-constrained devices, but their compression dynamics remain underexplored compared to Large Language Model (LLMs).
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Rethinking Network Pruning – under the Pre-train and Fine-tune Paradigm (2021.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Existing pruning results on benchmark transformers, such as BERT, are not as remarkable as those of convolutional neural networks.
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Structured Pruning of Large Language Models (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent advances in language modeling have led to remarkable improvements on a variety of tasks.
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Beyond Perplexity: Multi-dimensional Safety Evaluation of LLM Compression (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Prior work on compression prioritizes preserving perplexity, which is analogous to training loss.
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