16.8MLOct 14, 2025
Compressibility Measures Complexity: Minimum Description Length Meets Singular Learning TheoryEinar Urdshals, Edmund Lau, Jesse Hoogland et al.
We study neural network compressibility by using singular learning theory to extend the minimum description length (MDL) principle to singular models like neural networks. Through extensive experiments on the Pythia suite with quantization, factorization, and other compression techniques, we find that complexity estimates based on the local learning coefficient (LLC) are closely, and in some cases, linearly correlated with compressibility. Our results provide a path toward rigorously evaluating the limits of model compression.