#pruning

A brushed-steel electromechanical digit counter on a lab bench with its rightmost wheel caught mid-flip between two digits, blurred, while several different real devices sit wired to their own counters in the background

How Do We Know a Compressed Model Still Works?

A quantized or pruned model reported to lose less than a point of accuracy has been shown to average well across a benchmark. Whether it kept the one capability a deployment actually needs is a separate question the average is built to hide.

By Brecht Corbeel · August 12, 2026 · 15 min read

An open test sled holding a large accelerator board beside a much smaller one, a bridge cable connector caught mid-seat between their edge headers, its latch tab still lifted

Edge AI & Electronics

How a Model Actually Gets Small Enough to Run on a Phone

Distillation, pruning and quantization are not three names for the same haircut. Each removes a different kind of thing from a trained checkpoint, in a specific order, and each recovers the resulting loss by a different mechanism.

By Brecht Corbeel · August 12, 2026 · 21 min read

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