AutoCompress: Automated Hardware-Guided Model Compression

Research paper by Sheldon Liang and collaborators. Published 2026-11-05. Topics: LLM pruning, hardware-guided compression, differentiable architecture search, global and per-layer structure, heterogeneous architectures.

By Sheldon Liang, Ali Taghibakhshi, Saurav Muralidharan, Sharath Turuvekere Sreenivas, Ashwath Aithal, Pavlo Molchanov, Nima TajbakhshResearch paper

Resource information

Authors: Sheldon Liang, Ali Taghibakhshi, Saurav Muralidharan, Sharath Turuvekere Sreenivas, Ashwath Aithal, Pavlo Molchanov, Nima Tajbakhsh
Research area: Machine learning
Application domain: General AI research
AI methods: Large language models
Research topics: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv record date: 2026-11-05
Publication date: 2026-11-05
Publication: arXiv
Upstream last modified: Nov 6, 2026
License: CC BY 4.0
Last record update: Nov 9, 2026

Abstract

LLM pruning must preserve quality while meeting hardware- and workload-specific constraints on latency, throughput, and memory. Existing pruning workflows often target parameter counts, requiring practitioners to manually select model sizes that meet latency, throughput, and GPU memory limits. However, parameter count alone does not predict these metrics, which depend on the model architecture, workload, hardware, and serving engine. We introduce AutoCompress, a hardware-guided compression framework that directly incorporates such constraints into differentiable architecture search. AutoCompress jointly optimizes global and per-layer structure to produce heterogeneous architectures, guided by serving-engine cost models validated against end-to-end latency, throughput, and memory measurements. We evaluate AutoCompress on long-context local coding, batched datacenter serving, and latency-sensitive in-game interaction. Compared to the state-of-the-art Minitron pruning framework, AutoCompress improves average accuracy across eight benchmarks by 6.57, 2.35, and 0.57 percentage points on RTX 5070, RTX 5080, and H100, respectively. AutoCompress also compresses Nemotron 3.5 Super from 120B to 74B parameters for single-B200 BF16 serving at 128K context, retaining 95% of its mean benchmark score.