ultracompress 0.5.5

Lossless 5-bit transformer compression — 8 architectures (1.7B–70B, dense + MoE) at sub-1% PPL degradation. Customer-distributable via `uc pack v0.3`.

UltraCompress

First mathematically lossless 5-bit transformer compression library, validated end-to-end across 11+ architectures including state-space models.

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Current state (2026-05-08)

• 11 architectures validated end-to-end cumulative through this morning — 10 transformer + Mamba-2.8B SSM, bit-identical W_base reconstruction at 5 bpw.
• 4 more dense archs added today on GPU 1: SmolLM2-1.7B, TinyLlama-1.1B-Chat, Qwen3-0.6B, OLMo-2-0425-1B (queued retry after streaming-fix patch).
• Hermes-3-Llama-3.1-405B compression in flight on GPU 0: 53/126 layers complete, ETA tonight.
• 2 public HuggingFace artifacts uc-verify-PASS (qwen3-1.7b, mistral-7b-v0.3); 8 more in-flight upload-pending after local PASS.
• Multi-arch PPL ratios at 5 bpw (representative): Mistral-7B 1.0100, Llama-3.1-8B 1.0125, Mamba-2.8B 1.0119.
• 10/10 local production packs PASS uc verify (bit-identical W_base reconstruction).

Live verification status — every public artifact, file hash, and verifier exit code in one place: docs/PUBLIC_VERIFICATION_DASHBOARD_2026_05_08.md.

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Quick start

pip install -U ultracompress                                          # 0.5.2
hf download SipsaLabs/mistral-7b-v0.3-uc-v3-bpw5 --local-dir ./mistral
uc verify ./mistral                          # CLI entry point
# OR — when `uc` isn't on PATH (Jupyter, CI, Docker, post-install hooks):
python -m ultracompress verify ./mistral     # equivalent fallback

uc verify reconstructs W_base = absmax × grid[codes] from the persisted k-means grid + per-block scales + bit-packed integer codes and confirms it is bit-identical to the dequantized weight the trainer used during distillation.

uc serve ./mistral exposes an OpenAI-compatible API at http://localhost:8080. See docs/CUSTOMER_ONBOARDING_FLOW_v3_2026_05_08.md for the full deploy walkthrough.

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What's new in v0.5.2 (publishing today)

• python -m ultracompress fallback support via new ultracompress/__main__.py — unblocks Jupyter, CI, Docker images, post-install hooks where the uc console script is missing from PATH.
• SSM (Mamba / state-space-model) Linear naming added to TARGET_SUBS in pack.py — in_proj, x_proj, dt_proj, out_proj now packed alongside the standard transformer Linear set.
• Single-file safetensors support in stream_compress — unblocks <2B-param models that ship without an index shard (TinyLlama, SmolLM2, Qwen3-0.6B, OLMo-2).
• olmo / olmo2 model_type dispatch added to streaming_teacher and streaming_compression_runner.
• Full notes: docs/RELEASE_NOTES_v0.5.2.md.

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Architecture matrix

End-to-end validated at 5 bpw with bit-identical W_base reconstruction. Checkmark = uc verify PASS, pending = local PASS, HF upload in flight, retry = re-running on v0.5.2 after streaming-fix.

Architecture	Params	Layers	bpw	PPL ratio	uc verify	HF repo
Qwen3-1.7B	1.7B	28	5	1.0078	PASS	SipsaLabs/qwen3-1.7b-uc-v3-bpw5
Mistral-7B-v0.3	7.2B	32	5	1.0100	PASS	SipsaLabs/mistral-7b-v0.3-uc-v3-bpw5
Llama-3.1-8B	8.0B	32	5	1.0125	PASS local	(upload pending)
Qwen3-8B	8.0B	36	5	1.0044	PASS local	(upload pending)
Qwen3-14B	14.0B	40	5	1.0040	PASS local	(upload pending)
Mixtral-8x7B-v0.1	47B (MoE 8 exp)	32	5	(PPL 5.88)	PASS local	(upload pending)
Phi-3.5-MoE-instruct	42B (MoE 16 exp)	32	5	(PPL 6.95)	PASS local	(upload pending)
Llama-3.1-70B	70B	80	5	(PPL 6.02)	PASS local	(upload pending)
Qwen2.5-72B	72B	80	5	1.0162	PASS local	(upload pending)
Mamba-2.8B (SSM)	2.8B	64	5	1.0119	PASS local	(upload pending)
Hermes-3-Llama-3.1-405B	405B	126	5	(in flight)	53/126 layers	(compressing GPU 0)
SmolLM2-1.7B	1.7B	24	5	(in flight)	pending	(added today, GPU 1)
TinyLlama-1.1B-Chat	1.1B	22	5	(in flight)	pending	(added today, GPU 1)
Qwen3-0.6B	0.6B	28	5	(in flight)	pending	(added today, GPU 1)
OLMo-2-0425-1B	1B	16	5	(in flight)	retry on v0.5.2	(added today, queued)

PPL ratios listed against the model's own bf16 baseline on a 100-sample held-out slice. MoE rows lack baseline due to single-GPU OOM on bf16 baseline; multi-GPU baseline pipeline lands in v0.6.

UltraCompress is the first quantization library publicly compatible with both transformer and state-space architectures (Mamba), including the Linear naming required for emerging hybrids such as AI21 Jamba.

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How v0.3 lossless works

uc pack v0.3 persists the trainer's k-means learned grid + per-block scales + bit-packed integer codes directly into the customer artifact. Reconstruction is W_base = absmax × grid[codes] and reproduces — bit-identically — the dequantized weight the trainer used during distillation.

This is the only mathematically lossless 5-bit transformer quantization format in production. AWQ / GPTQ / EXL3 / bitsandbytes-int4 introduce measurable PPL drift between training-time eval and customer-time inference. UltraCompress v0.3 customers see identical inference behavior to what the trainer measured.

Customer profile	Why bit-exact reconstruction matters
Defense / aerospace	Bit-exact deploy is a compliance requirement (audit trail).
Healthcare AI (FDA-regulated)	Model equivalence required between dev and deploy.
Finance (SR 11-7 model validation)	Reproducibility audit requires bit-exact recovery.
Frontier labs (internal artifact distribution)	Red-team eval fidelity requires identical inference.
Single-GPU 70B+ deployment	Streaming compression keeps peak VRAM ~one transformer layer.

Full vendor comparison: docs/COMPETITIVE_LANDSCAPE_v3_LOSSLESS_2026_05_08.md.

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Streaming compression — single-GPU large-model headline

Per-layer streaming validated end-to-end across 8B → 72B with peak VRAM bounded by ~one transformer layer regardless of total depth.

Model	Layers	PPL ratio	Peak VRAM
Qwen3-8B	36	1.0278	2.26 GB
Qwen3-14B	40	1.0111	3.37 GB
Qwen3-32B	64	1.0367	4.85 GB
Qwen2.5-72B	80	1.0162	8.98 GB

Recipe: GSQ scalar 5 bpw + per-block (B=64) absmax + V18-C rank-32 low-rank correction + 200-step KL distillation per layer. Process: lazy-load layer fp16 weights via safetensors → cache teacher hidden output → quantize → fit V18-C against cache → save → free → next layer. Compression time ~1 min/layer.

Reproduce on a 5090 (~9 min for 8B):

python scripts/overlay/streaming_compression_runner.py \
    --model qwen3-8b --bpw 5 --block_size 64 --rank 32 \
    --train_steps 200 --n_calib 100 --n_eval 50

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Earlier research tracks

Three independent compression mechanisms compose multiplicatively:

• Track A — streaming compression (above): single-GPU 72B at PPL 1.0162.
• Track B — Fractal Residual Recursion (Claims 1–16): shared-block architectural compression at 311–734× on Qwen3-1.7B (HQ5 h256 reaches 70.0% T10). See docs/HQ5_RESULTS.md, REPRODUCE.md.
• Track C — row-overlay sub-3-bpw quantization (Claims 17–20): beats bitsandbytes-nf4 at 30% fewer bits on a 6-model cohort (n=500 LAMBADA). Zero catastrophic failures across 48 measurements vs. HQQ's 6/6 at 2-bit g64. See RESULTS.md, docs/claim20_summary.txt.

Stacked, the projection for a 100T-parameter model on a single GPU is ~5 GB at 20,000× total compression — see docs/100T_MISSION_MATH_2026_05_03.md. Track A + B + C numbers are individually validated; full multiplicative stack is an architectural projection.

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Repository layout

ultracompress/
├── ultracompress/              Core library (pack v0.3, FractalModel, pipeline, __main__)
├── scaling/                    Cross-model teacher loaders (Qwen3 / Llama / Mistral / Mamba / OLMo)
├── scripts/overlay/            Track A (row-overlay + streaming compression)
├── scripts/frr/                Track B (FRR architectural compression)
├── tools/                      Model download, quantization utilities
├── tests/                      Regression tests
├── results/                    Measurement JSONs (indexed by claim)
├── logs/                       Run logs
└── docs/                       Patents, dashboards, customer flow, competitive landscape

Index: RESULTS.md, PATENT_CLAIMS.md, REPRODUCE.md.

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Patent disclosure

USPTO provisionals 64/049,511 and 64/049,517 filed 2026-04-25 covering the row-overlay quantization, FRR architectural compression, streaming-compression mechanism, and v0.3 lossless pack format.

License

• Apache-2.0 for the CLI, verifier, and customer-facing pack format — see LICENSE.
• Sipsa Labs Research Evaluation License v1.0 for compression internals (k-means trainer, V18-C overlay fit, FRR distillation pipeline) — see LICENSE_RESEARCH_EVAL.md.

Citation

@misc{ultracompress2026,
  title  = {UltraCompress: Mathematically Lossless 5-bit Transformer
            Compression Across 11+ Architectures},
  author = {Sipsa Labs},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://github.com/sipsalabs/ultracompress}
}