Learning Parameter Sharing with Tensor Decompositions and Sparsity

Cem Üyük, Mike Lasby, Mohamed Yassin, Utku Evci, Yani Ioannou

Abstract: Large neural networks achieve remarkable performance, but their size hinders deployment on resource-constrained devices. While various compression techniques exist, parameter sharing remains relatively unexplored. This paper introduces Fine-grained Parameter Sharing (FiPS), a novel algorithm that leverages the relationship between parameter sharing, tensor decomposition, and sparsity to efficiently compress large vision transformer models. FiPS employs a shared base and sparse factors to represent shared neurons across multi-layer perception (MLP) modules. Shared parameterization is initialized via Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) and optimized by minimizing block-wise reconstruction error. Experiments demonstrate that FiPS compresses DeiT-B and Swin-L MLPs to 25-40% of their original parameter count while maintaining accuracy within 1 percentage point of the original models.