70% Size, 100% Accuracy: Lossless LLM Compression for Efficient GPU Inference via Dynamic-Length Float
Tianyi Zhang, Shaochen (Henry) Zhong, Mohsen Hariri, Vipin Chaudhary, Yang Sui, Xia Hu, Anshumali Shrivastava
Large-scale AI models, such as Large Language Models (LLMs) and Diffusion Models (DMs), have grown rapidly in size, creating significant challenges for efficient deployment on resource-constrained hardware. In this paper, we introduce Dynamic-Length Float (DFloat11), a lossless compression framework that reduces LLM and DM size by 30\% while preserving outputs that are bit-for-bit identical to the original model. DFloat11 is motivated by the low entropy in the BFloat16 weight representation of LLMs, which reveals significant inefficiency in the existing storage format. By applying entropy coding, DFloat11 assigns dynamic-length encodings to weights based on frequency, achieving near information-optimal compression without any loss of precision. To facilitate efficient inference with dynamic-length encodings, we develop a custom GPU kernel for fast online decompression. Our design incorporates the following: (i) compact, hierarchical lookup tables (LUTs) that fit within GPU SRAM for efficient decoding, (ii) a two-phase GPU kernel for coordinating thread read/write positions using lightweight auxiliary variables, and (iii) transformer-block-level decompression to minimize latency. Experiments on Llama 3.3, Qwen 3, Mistral 3, FLUX.1, and others validate our hypothesis that DFloat11 achieves around 30\% model size reduction while preserving bit-for-bit identical outputs. Compared to a potential alternative of offloading parts of an uncompressed model to the CPU to meet memory constraints, DFloat11 achieves 2.3--46.2$\times$ higher throughput in token generation. With a fixed GPU memory budget, DFloat11 enables 5.7--14.9$\times$ longer generation lengths than uncompressed models. Notably, our method enables lossless inference of Llama 3.1 405B, an 810GB model, on a single node equipped with 8$\times$80GB GPUs.