EntroLLM: Entropy Encoded Weight Compression for Efficient Large Language Model Inference on Edge Devices

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Authors: Arnab Sanyal, Gourav Datta, Prithwish Mukherjee, Sandeep Chinchali, Michael Orshansky
Cited by: 0
References: 32

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong performance across tasks, but face storage and compute challenges on edge devices. We propose EntroLLM, a compression framework combining mixed quantization and entropy coding to reduce storage while preserving accuracy. We use a combination of unsigned and asymmetric quantization. Tensor-level quantization produces an entropy-reducing effect, increasing weight compressibility, and improving downstream Huffman encoding by 7× (8-bit) and 11.3× (4-bit) over state-of-the-art methods. Huffman coding further reduces memory bandwidth demands, while a parallel decoding strategy enables efficient weight retrieval with minimal latency. Experiments on edge-scale LLMs (smolLM-1.7B, phi3-mini-4k, mistral- 7B) show up to 30% storage savings over uint8 and 65% over uint4 models, with 31.9–146.6% faster inference on memory-limited devices like the NVIDIA JETSON P3450. EntroLLM requires no retraining and is compatible with existing post-training quantization pipelines, making it practical for edge LLM deployment.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Speech Recognition and Synthesis Topic Modeling

Publication details

Journal / source
ICASSP 2026 - 2026 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)
Publisher
IEEE
Pages
19742–19746
Publication date
21 April 2026
Language
EN