Krishna Chintalapudi

Waleed Reda, Abhinav Jangda, Krishna Chintalapudi

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed for narrow tasks in resource-constrained settings, a central question arises: how much of an LLM is truly necessary for a given task? We present LLM-Sieve, a framework that prunes LLMs down to the minimal parameter subset needed to preserve task performance. Our approach introduces two innovations: (i) output-aligned non-orthogonal projections, which yield more faithful low-rank approximations than traditional PCA/SVD by aligning directly with layer outputs; and (ii) adaptive pruning via a Genetic Algorithm, which automatically discovers matrix-specific pruning levels and exposes the uneven distribution of task-relevant knowledge. Across models from 3.8B to 70B parameters, LLM-Sieve removes 20-75% of weights with only 1-5% accuracy loss-substantially ahead of prior pruning methods. Beyond efficiency, our framework reveals bottleneck matrices that concentrate critical knowledge, suggesting architectural implications for future LLM design. LLM-Sieve integrates seamlessly with LoRA fine-tuning and quantization, enabling both efficient deployment and deeper understanding of knowledge organization in LLMs.

Hang Qiu, Krishna Chintalapudi, Ramesh Govindan

Today, ground-truth generation uses data sets annotated by cloud-based annotation services. These services rely on human annotation, which can be prohibitively expensive. In this paper, we consider the problem of hybrid human-machine labeling, which trains a classifier to accurately auto-label part of the data set. However, training the classifier can be expensive too. We propose an iterative approach that minimizes total overall cost by, at each step, jointly determining which samples to label using humans and which to label using the trained classifier. We validate our approach on well known public data sets such as Fashion-MNIST, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet. In some cases, our approach has 6x lower overall cost relative to human labeling the entire data set, and is always cheaper than the cheapest competing strategy.

Hang Qiu, Krishna Chintalapudi, Ramesh Govindan

The democratization of machine learning (ML) has led to ML-based machine vision systems for autonomous driving, traffic monitoring, and video surveillance. However, true democratization cannot be achieved without greatly simplifying the process of collecting groundtruth for training and testing these systems. This groundtruth collection is necessary to ensure good performance under varying conditions. In this paper, we present the design and evaluation of Satyam, a first-of-its-kind system that enables a layperson to launch groundtruth collection tasks for machine vision with minimal effort. Satyam leverages a crowdtasking platform, Amazon Mechanical Turk, and automates several challenging aspects of groundtruth collection: creating and launching of custom web-UI tasks for obtaining the desired groundtruth, controlling result quality in the face of spammers and untrained workers, adapting prices to match task complexity, filtering spammers and workers with poor performance, and processing worker payments. We validate Satyam using several popular benchmark vision datasets, and demonstrate that groundtruth obtained by Satyam is comparable to that obtained from trained experts and provides matching ML performance when used for training.