In plain words: It squeezes model files smaller and expands them back to the exact original, so nothing is lost. Tailored to how neural network weights are stored, it saves 33% of the size on popular models, beating standard file compression on space and speed.
Abstract · ZipNN: Lossless Compression for AI Models
With the growth of model sizes and the scale of their deployment, their sheer size burdens the infrastructure requiring more network and more storage to accommodate these. While there is a vast model compression literature deleting parts of the model weights for faster inference, we investigate a more traditional type of compression - one that represents the model in a compact form and is coupled with a decompression algorithm that returns it to its original form and size - namely lossless compression. We present ZipNN a lossless compression tailored to neural networks. Somewhat surprisingly, we show that specific lossless compression can gain significant network and storage reduction on popular models, often saving 33% and at times reducing over 50% of the model size. We investigate the source of model compressibility and introduce specialized compression variants tailored for models that further increase the effectiveness of compression. On popular models (e.g. Llama 3) ZipNN shows space savings that are over 17% better than vanilla compression while also improving compression and decompression speeds by 62%. We estimate that these methods could save over an ExaByte per month of network traffic downloaded from a large model hub like Hugging Face.
Moshik Hershcovitch, Andrew Wood, Leshem Choshen, Guy Girmonsky, Roy Leibovitz, Ilias Ennmouri, Michal Malka, Peter Chin, Swaminathan Sundararaman, Danny Harnik
arXiv:2411.05239 · cs.LG, cs.IT · submitted Nov 7, 2024 · updated Jun 4, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · IEEE Cloud. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2404.15198