@inproceedings{williams-etal-2025-self,
    title = "Self-calibration for Language Model Quantization and Pruning",
    author = "Williams, Miles  and
      Chrysostomou, George  and
      Aletras, Nikolaos",
    editor = "Chiruzzo, Luis  and
      Ritter, Alan  and
      Wang, Lu",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = apr,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Albuquerque, New Mexico",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/corrections-2025-06/2025.naacl-long.509/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.naacl-long.509",
    pages = "10149--10167",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-189-6",
    abstract = "Quantization and pruning are fundamental approaches for model compression, enabling efficient inference for language models. In a post-training setting, state-of-the-art quantization and pruning methods require calibration data, a small set of unlabeled examples. Conventionally, this is randomly sampled web text, aiming to reflect the model training data. However, this poses two key problems: (1) unrepresentative calibration examples can harm model performance, and (2) organizations increasingly avoid releasing model training data. In this paper, we propose self-calibration as a solution. Our approach requires no external data, instead leveraging the model itself to generate synthetic calibration data, with a view to better approximating the pre-training data distribution. We extensively compare the performance of self-calibration with several baselines, across a variety of models, compression methods, and tasks. Our approach proves consistently competitive in maximizing downstream task performance, frequently outperforming even using real data."
}