James Jianqiao Yu


2025

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ImPart: Importance-Aware Delta-Sparsification for Improved Model Compression and Merging in LLMs
Yan Yang | Yixia Li | Hongru Wang | Xuetao Wei | James Jianqiao Yu | Yun Chen | Guanhua Chen
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

With the proliferation of task-specific large language models, delta compression has emerged as a method to mitigate the resource challenges of deploying numerous such models by effectively compressing the delta model parameters. Previous delta-sparsification methods either remove parameters randomly or truncate singular vectors directly after singular value decomposition (SVD). However, these methods either disregard parameter importance entirely or evaluate it with too coarse a granularity. In this work, we introduce ImPart, a novel importance-aware delta sparsification approach. Leveraging SVD, it dynamically adjusts sparsity ratios of different singular vectors based on their importance, effectively retaining crucial task-specific knowledge even at high sparsity ratios. Experiments show that ImPart achieves state-of-the-art delta sparsification performance, demonstrating higher compression ratio than baselines at the same performance level. When integrated with existing methods, ImPart sets a new state-of-the-art on delta quantization and model merging.