Rethinking the Role of Tensor Decompositions in Post-Training LLM CompressionArtur Zagitov, Alexander Miasnikov, Maxim Krutikov et al.
Post-training compression is essential for deploying large language models (LLMs) under tight resource constraints. Tensor decompositions have emerged as a promising direction, offering compact parameterizations well suited to Transformer weight structures. However, existing studies evaluate these methods in narrow settings, leaving unclear whether tensorization is effective at large-scale deployment. We systematically evaluate tensor compression across dense and MoE architectures, establishing performance trade-offs grounded in both empirical analysis and theoretical analysis. We identify a fundamental mismatch between the shared subspaces assumed by tensor decompositions and the heterogeneous representations learned by modern LLMs, thereby delineating their practical limits and clarifying their viable role in large-scale deployment. The code is available at https://github.com/brain-lab-research/TT-LLM.
8.9LGJun 24
Tensorion: A Tensor-Aware Generalization of the Muon OptimizerVladimir Bogachev, Vladimir Aletov, Alexander Molozhavenko et al.
Common first-order optimizers, such as Adam, implicitly treat each parameter block as an unstructured vector, which disregards the multilinear weight structure present in many modern machine learning models. Recent work has shown that exploiting matrix structure can improve optimization dynamics. A notable example is Muon, which performs steepest descent under the spectral norm constraint. We take the next step and introduce Tensorion, a tensor-aware optimizer that extends Muon's constrained optimization perspective from matrices to higher-order tensors. Tensorion is built around a linear minimization oracle (LMO) over a tensor norm ball. The norm is carefully chosen to balance two objectives: tightly bounding the tensor spectral norm, while still keeping the LMO tractable. This LMO becomes computable because it reduces to operations on adaptively selected unfolding matrices. Notably, when restricted to order-2 tensors (i.e., matrices), Tensorion recovers Muon exactly. Experiments on tensor-based computer vision problems suggest that Tensorion can offer improved convergence behavior and more stable gradient updates compared with Adam-based and existing tensor-aware baselines in the evaluated settings.