ARA: Adaptive Rank Allocation for Efficient Large Language Model SVD Compression

Abstract

In the field of large language model (LLM) compression, singular value decomposition (SVD) is a widely studied and adopted low-rank decomposition technique. Since SVD operates exclusively on linear modules, and these modules in LLMs are separated by nonlinear components, SVD can only be applied independently to each linear module. Under a global compression ratio constraint, determining the appropriate rank for different linear modules becomes a critical problem. Existing approaches, such as heuristic algorithms and mask-based training, have made progress in addressing this challenge. However, these methods still suffer from several limitations: heuristic algorithms explore the solution space within restricted regions, while mask-based training struggles to efficiently capture the relationship between singular value spectra and trainable parameters. More importantly, current methods overlook the key property that the gain function is non-smooth at a compression ratio of 1, which often leads the training process to suboptimal local minima. To address these issues, we propose an Adaptive Rank Allocation (ARA) method. Specifically, (1) ARA introduces a dedicated mask design that enables efficient mapping and updating between retained ranks and trainable parameters; and (2) it employs an additional loss function to guide parameter selection toward globally optimal solutions. Experimental results demonstrate that ARA achieves state-of-the-art performance. On the LLaMA2-7B model with a 80\% compression ratio, ARA reduces perplexity on WikiText2 from 8.38 to 6.42 and improves average zero-shot task accuracy by 9.72 percentage points compared with uniform compression. These results highlight the effectiveness of our method for rank allocation in SVD-based LLM compression.