Despite their remarkable achievements, modern Large Language Models (LLMs) encounter exorbitant computational and memory footprints. Recently, several works have shown significant success in training-free and data-free compression (pruning and quantization) of LLMs achieving 50-60% sparsity and reducing the bit-width down to 3 or 4 bits per weight, with negligible perplexity degradation over the uncompressed baseline. As recent research efforts are focused on developing increasingly sophisticated compression methods, our work takes a step back, and re-evaluates the effectiveness of existing SoTA compression methods, which rely on a fairly simple and widely questioned metric, perplexity (even for dense LLMs). We introduce Knowledge-Intensive Compressed LLM BenchmarK (LLM-KICK), a collection of carefully-curated tasks to re-define the evaluation protocol for compressed LLMs, which have significant alignment with their dense counterparts, and perplexity fail to capture subtle change in their true capabilities. LLM-KICK unveils many favorable merits and unfortunate plights of current SoTA compression methods: all pruning methods suffer significant performance degradation, sometimes at trivial sparsity ratios (e.g., 25-30%), and fail for N:M sparsity on knowledge-intensive tasks; current quantization methods are more successful than pruning; yet, pruned LLMs even at $\geq 50$% sparsity are robust in-context retrieval and summarization systems; among others. LLM-KICK is designed to holistically access compressed LLMs' ability for language understanding, reasoning, generation, in-context retrieval, in-context summarization, etc. We hope our study can foster the development of better LLM compression methods. All our related codes are planed to be open-sourced.

尽管现代大型语言模型在取得显著成就的同时遇到了过高的计算和内存占用问题，但最近的研究工作展示了基于裁剪和量化的无需训练和无需数据的压缩方法在压缩大型语言模型方面取得了显著成功。本研究介绍了一种名为LLM-KICK的压缩语言模型评估协议，通过其揭示了当前最先进的压缩方法的优点和缺点，并展示了稀疏化和量化对于语言理解、推理、生成、检索和摘要等任务的影响。我们希望这项研究能够促进更好的语言模型压缩方法的发展。

压缩LLMs：真实很少纯粹而简单