18.7ROMar 24
LiZIP: An Auto-Regressive Compression Framework for LiDAR Point CloudsAditya Shibu, Kayvan Karim, Claudio Zito
The massive volume of data generated by LiDAR sensors in autonomous vehicles creates a bottleneck for real-time processing and vehicle-to-everything (V2X) transmission. Existing lossless compression methods often force a trade-off: industry standard algorithms (e.g., LASzip) lack adaptability, while deep learning approaches suffer from prohibitive computational costs. This paper proposes LiZIP, a lightweight, near-lossless zero-drift compression framework based on neural predictive coding. By utilizing a compact Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) to predict point coordinates from local context, LiZIP efficiently encodes only the sparse residuals. We evaluate LiZIP on the NuScenes and Argoverse datasets, benchmarking against GZip, LASzip, and Google Draco (configured with 24-bit quantization to serve as a high-precision geometric baseline). Results demonstrate that LiZIP consistently achieves superior compression ratios across varying environments. The proposed system achieves a 7.5%-14.8% reduction in file size compared to the industry-standard LASzip and outperforms Google Draco by 8.8%-11.3% across diverse datasets. Furthermore, the system demonstrates generalization capabilities on the unseen Argoverse dataset without retraining. Against the general purpose GZip algorithm, LiZIP achieves a reduction of 38%-48%. This efficiency offers a distinct advantage for bandwidth constrained V2X applications and large scale cloud archival.
LGAug 3, 2025
Innovative tokenisation of structured data for LLM trainingKayvan Karim, Hani Ragab Hassen. Hadj Batatia
Data representation remains a fundamental challenge in machine learning, particularly when adapting sequence-based architectures like Transformers and Large Language Models (LLMs) for structured tabular data. Existing methods often fail to cohesively encode the mix of numerical and categorical features or preserve the inherent structure of tables. This paper introduces a novel, hybrid tokenisation methodology designed to convert tabular data into a unified, sequential format suitable for LLM training. Our approach combines predefined fixed tokens to represent structural elements and low-cardinality categorical features, with a learned subword vocabulary using Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) for high-cardinality and continuous values. We demonstrate the efficacy of this technique by applying it to a large-scale NetFlow dataset (CIDDS-001), preparing a corpus for a Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS) foundation model. The evaluation shows that our method is highly efficient, processing over 31 million network flows in under five hours and achieving a significant data compression ratio of 6.18:1. This process resulted in a computationally manageable corpus of over one billion tokens, establishing a viable and generalisable pathway for training foundation models on structured data.