AI engineering glossary · Inference serving optimisation
What is model compression?
Model compression: The family of techniques that make a trained model smaller or cheaper to run, including quantisation, pruning, distillation and low-rank factorisation. The goal is to keep useful accuracy while cutting memory, compute or energy.
Model compression: an example
A team combines 4-bit quantisation and pruning to shrink an image model from 400 MB to 90 MB for a budget Android phone.
Related terms
More Inference serving optimisation terms
Where you learn it
Model compression is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.