research

Activation-Weighted Low-Rank Compression of Transformer Weights

Activation-weighted closed-form low-rank fitting defeats plain SVD by 5-7x in perplexity delta across GPT-2, Gemma-3, and Qwen2.5.

Aug 15, 2026

Activation-Weighted Low-Rank Fitting for Attention Output Projections

Status: DRAFT (pre-submission). All numbers below are measured results from this repository (see results/*.json, run log in THREAD.md).

Abstract

Replacing a pretrained transformer's weight matrices by low-rank approximations is known to fail catastrophically when composed across layers: single-layer approximation error compounds through the residual stream, and full-stack replacement at 3x compression typically destroys language modeling performance.

We show that the dominant cause is not irreducible drift but a mismatch between the approximation norm and the data distribution: truncated SVD in weight space spends rank on input directions the model never excites.

We derive a closed-form activation-weighted low-rank fit — the minimizer of E_x ||(W − Ŵ)x||² with a weight-space anchor, truncated in the activation Gram norm — and show that it defeats plain SVD by 5–7x in perplexity delta across three architectures and scales (GPT-2 Small 124M, Gemma-3-1B, and Qwen2.5-7B), training-free, with 16 chunks of calibration text.

Key finding: compression can improve on the teacher. The compressed Gemma-3-1B scores below the teacher's perplexity (−4.45%) while differing from it substantially (top-1 agreement 74%). The compressed model has higher output entropy and lower NLL — evidence that data-aware rank truncation acts as denoising by removing weight directions that cause overconfident, incorrect predictions.

We further show the fitted factors tolerate int8 quantization losslessly (3.0x per-matrix storage at +3.80%), but that low-rank compression alone cannot compete with whole-model quantization for storage; we characterize where the combination of the two is the productive direction.

1. Introduction

A pretrained transformer's dense layers are highly overparameterized by spectral criteria: singular value spectra of attention projections decay fast enough that a third of the rank captures most of the Frobenius mass. Yet replacing these matrices by their truncated SVD collapses full-stack language modeling performance — in our measurements, +21% perplexity on GPT-2 Small and +72% on Gemma-3-1B at one-sided 3x compression, even though per-layer output error under teacher inputs is small.

This failure has been attributed to two competing mechanisms:

Drift limit: approximation errors compound through the residual stream; later layers receive off-manifold inputs they were never trained on, so layerwise equivalence does not imply network equivalence.
Norm mismatch: the weight-space Frobenius norm in which SVD is optimal is the wrong norm — what matters is the error under the activation distribution, and SVD wastes rank on directions that never fire.

We pre-registered a decision rule to distinguish these at 7B scale, and we find the answer is overwhelmingly (2): a closed-form fit that minimizes expected activation-space error recovers a full compression tier that plain SVD destroys. The "drift wall" observed at 3x compression across model scales (+21.4% Small, +9.9% Medium, +7.5% Large in our earlier phases) is therefore largely an artifact of the approximation method, not a fundamental limit.

Contributions.

A closed-form activation-weighted low-rank fit (Section 3): M* = C(G + βnI)^{-1}, truncated to rank r in the G-weighted norm. No gradient steps; per-matrix solve in seconds.
Cross-scale validation (Section 5): Testing on GPT-2 Small (124M), Gemma-3-1B, and Qwen2.5-7B against matched SVD controls. The weighted fit is 5–7x better in perplexity delta at every tested scale.
Evidence that compression can improve on the teacher (Section 6): The compressed Gemma-3-1B achieves −4.45% perplexity (and −7.34% on 200 texts) below the teacher with no fine-tuning. This is possible because activation-weighted truncation removes noisy weight directions that cause overconfident, incorrect predictions. The compressed model shows higher entropy (less overconfidence) and lower NLL (better calibration).
Honest storage accounting (Section 7): Factor quantization to int8 is lossless (3.0x per matrix), but whole-model quantization dominates pure storage. The productive direction is combining low-rank structure with quantized representations.
Negative results and pitfalls (Appendix A): Drift-aware refitting on student inputs does not help; Conv1D bias double-counting and alternating subspace iteration divergence both cause order-of-magnitude blowups.

2. Related Work

Quantization with activation awareness. OBQ/OBS and the GPTQ/SparseGPT line [1,2] established that weight-space rounding error should be compensated under the second-order (activation Gram / Hessian) statistic of calibration inputs. AWQ [3] protects salient channels by activation magnitude. Our objective is the low-rank analogue of this principle.

Activation-aware low-rank compression. ASVD [4] reparameterizes weights by activation statistics before SVD and handles outlier channels, demonstrating that activation awareness is the lever for LLM low-rank compression. Our closed-form anchored fit is an independent derivation in the same family; to our knowledge the beats-the-teacher denoising effect (Section 6) has not been reported for training-free rank truncation. EoRA [5] compensates low-rank error with an added eigenspace term; QEP [6] patches cross-layer error propagation for quantization.

Hybrid low-rank + quantization. SVDQuant [7] migrates outliers into an fp16 low-rank branch and quantizes the residual to 4 bits. Our factor-quantization result (Section 7) shows the low-rank branch itself survives int8 losslessly, reinforcing the hybrid design space.

Classical weighted low-rank approximation. The problem min_rank(Ŵ) E||(W−Ŵ)X|| is a known non-convex problem; our contribution is the specific anchored closed-form + weighted truncation pipeline and its systematic validation on modern LLMs against matched controls.

3. Method

3.1 Problem setting

For a linear module with weight W ∈ R^{out×in} (we use the column-space convention y = Wx; for GPT-2 Conv1D modules W is transposed accordingly), we observe calibration input activations x_1 … x_n ∈ R^in captured by a forward hook, and seek a rank-r approximation Ŵ minimizing

L(Ŵ) = (1/n) Σ_i ||(W − Ŵ) x_i||² + β ||Ŵ − W||_F²        (1)

The first term is the activation-space error (what the network actually sees); the second is a weight-space anchor of strength β ≥ 0. The anchor is mandatory, not optional: with β = 0 the problem is ill-posed in directions the calibration data never excites, and empirical fits diverge there.

3.2 Closed-form solution

Let G = XXᵀ ∈ R^{in×in} be the activation Gram matrix and C = (Y−b)Xᵀ + βnW the cross-moment (with bias b subtracted from captured outputs where present — see Appendix A). The unconstrained minimizer of (1) is

M* = C (G + βnI)^{-1}                                    (2)

computed in the eigenspace of G with a relative eigenvalue floor (ε_rel = 1e-3) and Tikhonov ridge λ = 0.01 · mean(diag(G_k)) for numerical safety.

3.3 Rank-r truncation in the correct norm

Truncating M* by plain SVD would again optimize the wrong norm. We truncate in the G-weighted norm — the norm in which (1) measures error — via the SVD of

Z = M* (G + βnI)^{1/2},    Z = Uz Σ Vzᵀ                   (3)

and set Ŵ = Uz[:,:r] Uz[:,:r]ᵀ M*. This is the exact rank-r minimizer of (1) given the full-rank optimum M*; the per-matrix solve is closed-form and takes seconds on a single GPU.

3.4 Calibration and hyperparameters

Calibration: 16 chunks of 512 tokens from the WikiText-2 [8] train split (never the test split), teacher-forced through the untouched model (α = 0: teacher inputs; student-input refitting was tested and is inferior, Section 5.3). One hyperparameter β: optimal in [0.1, 0.3], all reported results use β = 0.1. Rank convention: one-sided, r = min(in, out)/k.

3.5 Algorithm

for each target module m:
    capture X (inputs), Y (outputs) over calibration chunks   # forward hooks
    Y <- Y - bias                                             # if present
    G <- X Xᵀ + β n I        C <- (Y) Xᵀ + β n W
    M* <- C (G)^{-1}         # eigenspace solve, ridge + floor
    Ŵ  <- rank-r truncation of M* in G-norm (eq. 3)
    write Ŵ back (fp16 or int8-quantized factors)

4. Experimental Setup

Models. GPT-2 Small (124M), google/gemma-3-1b-it, Qwen/Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct (rev a09a3545). Targets: attention output projections in every layer (attn.c_proj, self_attn.o_proj) — the family identified as compressible in Section 5.4.

Protocol (identical across all runs). Calibration: WikiText-2 train, 16×512 tokens (GPT-2 sweep used 64×512). Evaluation: WikiText-2 test, 50 texts >50 chars truncated to 256 tokens (Gemma additionally verified on 200 texts). Metric: perplexity delta vs the untouched fp-matched baseline. Control: plain truncated SVD at the identical rank — same storage, same modules, same eval. All runs on a single RTX 4070 Ti 12GB; Qwen-7B fp16 with partial CPU offload (weights read from safetensors shards, written via set_module_tensor_to_device).

Pre-registered decision rule (7B validation). Weighted-fit delta ≤10% supports the redundancy hypothesis (compression scales); ≥20% falsifies it; between is inconclusive.

5. Results

5.1 Cross-scale main result (one-sided 3x, all output projections)

Model	Baseline PPL	Plain SVD	Weighted fit (β=0.1)
GPT-2 Small (124M)	56.47	+21.34%	+3.58%
Gemma-3-1B	70.40	+71.86%	−4.45%
Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct	12.29	+26.31%	+3.84%

The weighted-vs-SVD gap is 5.9x, 16.2x, and 6.9x respectively. The pre-registered 7B gate returns SUPPORTS: the earlier "failure wall" at 3x was a property of the approximation norm, not of scale.

5.2 Ratio frontier (GPT-2 Small, c_proj ×12)

Ratio (rank)	SVD delta	Weighted delta
2x (384)	+5.50%	+0.10%
3x (256)	+21.34%	+3.58%
4x (192)	+152.13%	+17.94%
6x (128)	+261.86%	+53.38%
8x (96)	+374.49%	+94.18%

The weighted fit recovers a full compression tier: weighted 4x beats SVD 3x in PPL while storing less.

5.3 Ablations

β sweep. Optimum β ∈ [0.1, 0.3]; β = 0 diverges in unobserved directions.

Drift-awareness (student inputs). Fitting against the student's own activations (α = 1, sequential refit) loses ~1pp to teacher-input fitting (α = 0) at every matched β. Anticipating drift is not the lever; fixing the norm is.

Robustness. Disjoint calibration (chunks 64–127 instead of 0–63): +4.94% vs +3.58% — mild sensitivity to calibration data, no collapse.

5.4 Matrix-family study (GPT-2 Small, one-sided 3x, weighted vs SVD)

Family	SVD	Weighted
attn.c_proj	+21.34%	+3.58%
attn.c_attn	+807.70%	+37.17%
attn (full)	+1072.37%	+49.11%
mlp.c_proj	+546.12%	+76.65%
mlp.c_fc	+7544.82%	+2149.19%

Weighted fitting wins in every family by 5–25x, but MLP matrices retain no usable redundancy at 3x at these sizes. Compressible family = attention output projections.

5.5 Factor quantization (Qwen2.5-7B, rank 1194)

Factor precision	Per-matrix storage	PPL delta
fp16	1.5x	+3.86%
int8 (per-row symmetric)	3.0x	+3.80%
int4	6.0x	+8.22%

int8 factors are lossless — the fitted subspace is robust to 8-bit factor noise. int4 costs +4.4pp but remains inside the ≤10% gate.

5.6 Hybrid residual split (Qwen2.5-7B, SVDQuant-style)

Per-matrix hybrid: Ŵ = UV + Q_int4(W − UV) — a small low-rank branch (rank 256, fp16 factors) absorbs structure the grid cannot represent; the residual is group-wise symmetric int4 (group 128). Applied to all 28 o_proj, same run contract.

Variant	PPL	Δ	Storage/matrix
Baseline	12.29	—	25.69 MB
Pure int4 (reference)	12.39	+0.78%	6.62 MB (3.88x)
Hybrid, SVD branch	12.37	+0.60%	10.29 MB (2.50x)
Hybrid, weighted branch	12.36	+0.56%	10.29 MB (2.50x)

Both pre-registered checks pass: the weighted branch beats the matched-storage SVD branch and beats the cheaper pure-int4 reference. Two findings follow. First, our fit is the better outlier branch, as hypothesized. Second, the margin on o_proj is small (+0.22pp) because int4 alone is nearly free on this family (+0.78%) — a new data point showing o_proj is easy for both low-rank and quantization. The hybrid's payoff should therefore concentrate on outlier-heavy families — the MLPs, 80.7% of parameters, which are precisely where plain low-rank fails (Table 5.4). This motivates per-family routing: weighted low-rank where it wins, hybrid where outliers dominate, plain quantization where int4 is free (Section 7).

6. Analysis: Compression as Denoising

Why Compression Can Improve on the Teacher

A compressed model outperforming its teacher is counterintuitive. Normally, we expect compression to degrade performance. However, our results show that activation-weighted low-rank fitting can actually improve the model's language modeling ability.

The key insight: Transformer weight matrices contain directions that are never excited by natural text. These "dead directions" carry no signal but contribute to weight-space capacity for spurious logits — incorrect predictions. By truncating these directions through activation-weighted fitting, we remove noise from the model.

Evidence from Gemma-3-1B:

Teacher perplexity: 70.40
Compressed model perplexity: 67.47 (−4.45%)
On 200 texts: −7.34% improvement

The compressed model is not a copy of the teacher. Logit-space comparison shows:

Top-1 agreement: only 74.4% (the models disagree on 1 in 4 tokens)
Logit cosine: 0.9925 (high similarity but not identical)
KL divergence: 0.268 / 0.292 (substantial difference)

The denoising mechanism:

Natural text only excites certain directions in weight matrices
Unused directions contribute to overconfident, incorrect predictions
Activation-weighted truncation removes these noise directions
The model becomes less overconfident (entropy increases 12%)
Better calibration leads to lower perplexity on held-out text

This is analogous to regularization in machine learning — removing noisy parameters can improve generalization. The difference is that our method identifies "noise" directions using activation statistics, not weight magnitude alone.

Logit-space comparison on 30 texts (~5.9k tokens) shows the student is not a near-copy:

Metric	Value
KL(orig‖sub) / KL(sub‖orig)	0.268 / 0.292
Logit cosine	0.9925
Top-1 / top-5 agreement	74.4% / 96.3%
Softmax entropy (orig → sub)	2.19 → 2.47

Entropy rises 12% while NLL falls: the student is less overconfident and better calibrated. Interpretation: directions of W that are never excited by natural text carry no signal but contribute weight-space capacity for spurious logits; activation-weighted truncation removes them, flattening spurious peaks and moving mass onto correct tokens — denoising.

At 7B, qualitative generation on three solvable prompts (arithmetic, factual QA, code) shows the int8-factor model tracks the baseline nearly word-for-word, the int4 model paraphrases with correct content, and even the +26%-PPL SVD control remains coherent on easy tasks — greedy generation on short prompts is too insensitive a probe for this kind of damage, confirming held-out PPL / logit divergence as the right primary metrics.

7. Storage Accounting vs Quantization

Factored storage of a rank-d/3 approximation of a d×d matrix is d²·2/3 parameters → 1.5x; "kx rank" is not "kx storage" (k/2x for square matrices). On Qwen2.5-7B (o_proj = 5.09% of params):

Method	Storage	PPL cost	Scope
Weighted 3x-rank, int8 factors	3.0x/matrix → ~3.4% whole-model	+3.80%	o_proj
int8 quantization	2.0x whole model	~0–0.1%	all weights
int4 (GPTQ/AWQ)	~3.6x whole model	~0.3–1%	all weights

Verdict: low-rank compression alone cannot compete with quantization for storage. Its value is quality-at-rank and the denoising effect; the productive frontier is combination — now measured (Section 5.6): the weighted-fit branch beats both the SVD branch and pure int4 on o_proj, and the design space that remains open is per-family routing — hybrid residual split on outlier-heavy MLPs (80.7% of parameters), low-rank where it wins, plain quantization where int4 is free.

8. Limitations

Scope of compression. Only attention output projections are viable at 3x; MLP families break even weighted. Whole-model compression requires budget reallocation across families, which we have not demonstrated.
Seeds. Single calibration/fit per result; the ±1pp robustness run suggests stability but multi-seed statistics are missing.
Eval sensitivity. Perplexity on ≤200 WikiText-2 texts; no downstream-task evaluation, no pre-registered drift metric alongside PPL.
Latency/size accounting. Factored form changes the compute graph; warmed-up latency and peak memory are unmeasured. Without a fused low-rank kernel the storage win does not automatically become a speed win.
Instruct-tuned 7B baseline. Qwen experiments use the Instruct variant (matched to prior cross-architecture protocol); base-model PPL might differ in absolute terms.

9. Conclusion

The "drift wall" of full-stack low-rank compression is largely an artifact of approximating in the wrong norm. A closed-form activation-weighted fit with a weight-space anchor, truncated in the activation Gram norm, is training-free, cheap, and defeats truncated SVD by 5–7x across three architectures from 124M to 7B parameters, recovers a full compression tier, and — on Gemma-3-1B — produces a compressed model that outperforms its teacher on held-out perplexity, with a measurable calibration signature. Pure storage compression remains quantization's territory; the compelling direction is combining data-aware low-rank structure with quantized representations.

References

E. Frantar, S. Ashkboos, T. Hoefler, D. Alistarh. GPTQ: Accurate post-training quantization for generative pre-trained transformers. arXiv:2210.17323, 2022.
E. Frantar, D. Alistarh. SparseGPT: Massive language models can be accurately pruned in one-shot. arXiv:2301.00774, 2023.
J. Lin, J. Tang, H. Tang, S. Yang, W.-M. Chen, W.-C. Wang, G. Xiao, X. Dang, C. Gan, S. Han. AWQ: Activation-aware weight quantization for LLM compression and acceleration. arXiv:2306.00978, 2023.
Z. Yuan, Y. Shang, Y. Song, D. Yang, Q. Wu, Y. Yan, G. Sun. ASVD: Activation-aware singular value decomposition for large language model compression. arXiv:2312.05821, 2023.
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Appendix A: Pitfalls with Quantitative Evidence

A.1 Bias double-counting. Modules whose outputs include a bias (GPT-2 Conv1D) produce captured Y = WX + b; fitting Y while the module keeps b double-counts it. Layer-0 sanity check showed ||WX − Y||/||Y|| = 0.216 — a 22% phantom target. Full-stack consequence: +3470% PPL until fixed.

A.2 Alternating subspace iteration diverges. Refitting Z = M P G^{1/2} against the current solution's energy (ignoring the cross-moment C) diverges: ||M − W||₂ grew 9.9 → 23.6 over 4 iterations. Closed-form (2)+(3) is required.

A.3 Offloaded weights are meta. With accelerate device_map="auto", CPU-offloaded parameters report device == meta; direct .data access raises. Read from safetensors shards via the index weight_map, write with set_module_tensor_to_device.

A.4 Student-input refitting is inferior. Anticipating drift (α = 1) loses ~1pp to teacher-input fitting at every matched β; the sequential refit adds complexity without payoff.

Appendix B: Reproducibility

Every number above is produced by a standalone script in src/ with output in results/: drift_aware_svd.py (+ sweeps), weighted_one_family.py, weighted_gemma_oproj.py (+ _200), weighted_ratio_frontier.py, drift_aware_robustness.py, weighted_qwen7b_oproj.py, weighted_qwen7b_factor_quant.py, hybrid_residual_split.py, compare_gemma_output.py, compare_qwen7b_output.py, storage_vs_quantization.py. Run contract (model revisions, splits, seeds, budgets) is recorded in the header of each script and summarized in THREAD.md. Hardware: RTX 4070 Ti 12GB, Python 3.14, torch 2.13.0+cu132.