Skip to main content

compressed-tensors

The compressed-tensors library extends the safetensors format, providing a versatile and efficient way to store and manage compressed tensor data. This library supports various quantization and sparsity schemes, making it a unified format for handling different model optimizations like GPTQ, AWQ, SmoothQuant, INT8, FP8, SparseGPT, and more.

Why compressed-tensors?

As model compression becomes increasingly important for efficient deployment of LLMs, the landscape of quantization and compression techniques has become increasingly fragmented. Each method often comes with its own storage format and loading procedures, making it challenging to work with multiple techniques or switch between them. compressed-tensors addresses this by providing a single, extensible format that can represent a wide variety of compression schemes.

  • Unified Checkpoint Format: Supports various compression schemes in a single, consistent format.
  • Wide Compatibility: Works with popular quantization methods like GPTQ, SmoothQuant, and FP8. See llm-compressor
  • Flexible Quantization Support:
    • Weight-only quantization (e.g., W4A16, W8A16, WnA16)
    • Activation quantization (e.g., W8A8)
    • KV cache quantization
    • Non-uniform schemes (different layers can be quantized in different ways!)
  • Sparsity Support: Handles both unstructured and semi-structured (e.g., 2:4) sparsity patterns.
  • Open-Source Integration: Designed to work seamlessly with Hugging Face models and PyTorch.

This allows developers and researchers to easily experiment with composing different quantization methods, simplify model deployment pipelines, and reduce the overhead of supporting multiple compression formats in inference engines.

Installation

From PyPI

Stable release:

pip install compressed-tensors

Nightly release:

pip install compressed-tensors-nightly

From Source

git clone https://github.com/neuralmagic/compressed-tensors
cd compressed-tensors
pip install -e .

Getting started

Saving/Loading Compressed Tensors (Bitmask Compression)

The function save_compressed uses the compression_format argument to apply compression to tensors. The function load_compressed reverses the process: converts the compressed weights on disk to decompressed weights in device memory.

from compressed_tensors import save_compressed, load_compressed, BitmaskConfig
from torch import Tensor
from typing import Dict

# the example BitmaskConfig method efficiently compresses 
# tensors with large number of zero entries 
compression_config = BitmaskConfig()

tensors: Dict[str, Tensor] = {"tensor_1": Tensor(
    [[0.0, 0.0, 0.0], 
     [1.0, 1.0, 1.0]]
)}
# compress tensors using BitmaskConfig compression format (save them efficiently on disk)
save_compressed(tensors, "model.safetensors", compression_format=compression_config.format)

# decompress tensors (load_compressed returns a generator for memory efficiency)
decompressed_tensors = {}
for tensor_name, tensor in load_compressed("model.safetensors", compression_config = compression_config):
    decompressed_tensors[tensor_name] = tensor

Saving/Loading Compressed Models (Bitmask Compression)

We can apply bitmask compression to a whole model. For more detailed example see example directory.

from compressed_tensors import save_compressed_model, load_compressed, BitmaskConfig
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM

model_name = "neuralmagic/llama2.c-stories110M-pruned50"
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(model_name, torch_dtype="auto")

original_state_dict = model.state_dict()

compression_config = BitmaskConfig()

# save compressed model weights
save_compressed_model(model, "compressed_model.safetensors", compression_format=compression_config.format)

# load compressed model weights (`dict` turns generator into a dictionary)
state_dict = dict(load_compressed("compressed_model.safetensors", compression_config))

For more in-depth tutorial on bitmask compression, refer to the notebook.

Saving a Compressed Model with PTQ

We can use compressed-tensors to run basic post training quantization (PTQ) and save the quantized model compressed on disk

model_name = "TinyLlama/TinyLlama-1.1B-intermediate-step-1431k-3T"
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(model_name, device_map="cuda:0", torch_dtype="auto")

config = QuantizationConfig.parse_file("./examples/bit_packing/int4_config.json")
config.quantization_status = QuantizationStatus.CALIBRATION
apply_quantization_config(model, config)

dataset = load_dataset("ptb_text_only")["train"]
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_name)

def tokenize_function(examples):
    return tokenizer(examples["sentence"], padding=False, truncation=True, max_length=1024)

tokenized_dataset = dataset.map(tokenize_function, batched=True)
data_loader = DataLoader(tokenized_dataset, batch_size=1, collate_fn=DefaultDataCollator())

with torch.no_grad():
    for idx, sample in tqdm(enumerate(data_loader), desc="Running calibration"):
        sample = {key: value.to(device) for key,value in sample.items()}
        _ = model(**sample)

        if idx >= 512:
            break

model.apply(freeze_module_quantization)
model.apply(compress_quantized_weights)

output_dir = "./ex_llama1.1b_w4a16_packed_quantize"
compressor = ModelCompressor(quantization_config=config)
compressed_state_dict = compressor.compress(model)
model.save_pretrained(output_dir, state_dict=compressed_state_dict)

For more in-depth tutorial on quantization compression, refer to the notebook.

Metadata

Release files for compressed-tensors-nightly 0.9.2.20250225

For a detailed explanation of source distributions (sdists) and built distributions (wheels), please see the package formats documentation.

Source distribution (sdist)

Source distribution for compressed-tensors-nightly 0.9.2.20250225
File Size Uploaded
compressed_tensors_nightly-0.9.2.20250225.tar.gz 66.1 kB Details

Built distribution (wheel)

Table of built distributions (wheels) for compressed-tensors-nightly 0.9.2.20250225
File Interpreter ABI Platform
compressed_tensors_nightly-0.9.2.20250225-py3-none-any.whl Python 3 none any Details

Total release size: 164.1 kB

Release files / compressed_tensors_nightly-0.9.2.20250225.tar.gz

Download URL compressed_tensors_nightly-0.9.2.20250225.tar.gz
Size 66.1 kB
Tags Source
SHA-256 checksum
How to use checksums
4f581dc58ee81a072564e436a46ebb1ed4cbb71c72f0f4187fbd1c157e8aeb5f
BLAKE2b-256 checksum
How to use checksums
ea03b4b6c9b54c3721e3b691f440729ca719796fd8f3e1cf112f3dd778bb996b
Upload date
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing?
What is trusted publishing?
No
Uploaded via twine/6.1.0 CPython/3.10.12

Release files / compressed_tensors_nightly-0.9.2.20250225-py3-none-any.whl

Download URL compressed_tensors_nightly-0.9.2.20250225-py3-none-any.whl
Size 98.1 kB
Tags Python 3
SHA-256 checksum
How to use checksums
4549e9157acf36f77293f41dd6968018f8f5209bcc855bc59a85a7bfec2c7f4a
BLAKE2b-256 checksum
How to use checksums
3ea8f6e2461b6cc453e5fd5e3e980c853b65367c08d74be5a4a91d19e41e2368
Upload date
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing?
What is trusted publishing?
No
Uploaded via twine/6.1.0 CPython/3.10.12

Release history Release notifications | RSS feed

This release

0.9.2.20250225 This release

2 release files

Anthropic, PBC Visionary sponsor Bloomberg Visionary sponsor Hudson River Trading Visionary sponsor Meta Visionary sponsor NVIDIA Visionary sponsor Microsoft Sustainability sponsor Depot Continuous Integration AWS Cloud computing and Security Sponsor Datadog Monitoring Fastly CDN Google Download Analytics Sentry Error logging StatusPage Status page