cs.CLOct 9, 2026

zip2zip++: Towards Inference-Time Token Compression with Minimal Quality Loss

Authors: Saibo Geng, Andrea Gentilini, Xinxian Ma, Nathan Ranchin, Yunzhen Yao, Robert West

Organizations: EPFL · Technical University of Munich · Zuse School ELIZA · ETH Zürich

Abstract

Dynamic vocabularies built on-the-fly via Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW) compression let a language model represent the same text in fewer tokens, but prior work shows that this efficiency comes at a cost to reasoning and perplexity. We show that this quality gap is not a fundamental price of compression but can be substantially closed through targeted improvements to the compression layer and LZW codec, without modifying the underlying pretrained language model. Our analysis reveals four key issues: (1) LZW's compression algorithm creates an implicit conflict between the input embedding and the output embedding, a tension that a single shared embedding cannot resolve; (2) naively applying RoPE to LZW-compressed sequences ignores that merged tokens can span multiple tokens; (3) merging certain tokens (notably digits) disproportionately hurts downstream accuracy; and (4) dynamic vocabularies introduce an inherent segmentation ambiguity that confounds standard evaluation. We address these through decoupled input/output dynamic embedding layer, size-aware RoPE positioning, and a modified LZW codec supporting selective merges and multi-view segmentations. Across four models, our recipe improves perplexity on every corpus we evaluated as well as mathematical reasoning accuracy, closing roughly half the quality gap between zip2zip and the uncompressed baseline at a similar compression ratio on general text. This represents a significant step toward lossless adaptive-vocabulary compression for language models.

Figures & tables

Appendix figures & tables15 assets

Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.

Appendix

Explore similar work

May 23, 2026

SemanticZip: A Pilot Framework for Lossy Text Compression with LLMs as Semantic Decompressors

Text compression for large language model (LLM) systems is usually framed as token deletion, retrieval, summarization, or exact reconstruction. We study a more aggressive but explicitly lossy setting: compress text into compact codes that an LLM can expand into task-relevant meaning. We call this setting SemanticZip. Unlike lossless compression, SemanticZip does not require byte-identical reconstruction; unlike ordinary summarization, it treats model-based decompression as part of the codec and evaluates whether task-relevant semantic commitments are recovered. This paper is a pilot framework, not a benchmark claim. We formalize LLM-mediated decompression, define a protected/lossy packet architecture, and evaluate six representation regimes over five author-constructed diagnostic cases: structured prose, JSON, CCL-Core, CCL-Min, SemanticZip ASCII, and SemanticZip emoji. An independent decoder LLM reconstructs typed semantic atoms from each compressed representation, and we score Critical Atom Recall, Weighted Atom Recall, precision, and tokenizer gain. In this pilot, structured prose has the highest recoverability, with WAR = 0.956 and 19.1% o200k_base token gain. CCL-Min is the strongest balanced point, with 39.4% token gain and WAR = 0.874. SemanticZip ASCII provides the largest useful compression, with 46.5% token gain and WAR = 0.802, while emoji-heavy SemanticZip performs worse on both compression and recovery. The main contribution is not the claim that these numbers establish a universal frontier. Rather, we introduce a reproducible experimental interface for studying lossy, LLM-decompressible text codes and a design principle: safety-critical and exact commitments should remain protected, while predictable low-risk context may be semantically zipped.
Feb 26, 2026

Frequency-Ordered Tokenization for Better Text Compression

We present frequency-ordered tokenization (FOT), a simple preprocessing technique that improves lossless text compression by exploiting the power-law frequency distribution of natural language (Zipf's law). FOT segments text into the vocabulary of a pretrained Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) tokenizer, renumbers tokens by frequency with a fixed table, and writes them with a short byte code before any standard compressor. Because the FOT stream is less than half the size of the text, compressors produce smaller output and run faster at the same time. On enwik8 (100 MB of Wikipedia), FOT reduces the compressed size by 7.96 percentage points (pp) for zlib, 2.24 pp for xz (LZMA), 1.96 pp for brotli and 1.44 pp for zstd, while making total compression, including the transform, 1.6x, 3.2x, 1.8x and 5.0x faster. Gains hold from 100 KB to 1 GB (enwik9) and across texts of diverse languages, and outperform the classical Word Replacing Transform. On enwik9, FOT with tuned xz sets a new state of the art among LZ-based compressors on the Large Text Compression Benchmark. The method can be implemented in under 50 lines of code.
Mar 18, 2026

ZipServ: Fast and Memory-Efficient LLM Inference with Hardware-Aware Lossless Compression

Lossless model compression holds tremendous promise for alleviating the memory and bandwidth bottlenecks in bit-exact Large Language Model (LLM) serving. However, existing approaches often result in substantial inference slowdowns due to fundamental design mismatches with GPU architectures: at the kernel level, variable-length bitstreams produced by traditional entropy codecs break SIMT parallelism; at the system level, decoupled pipelines lead to redundant memory traffic. We present ZipServ, a lossless compression framework co-designed for efficient LLM inference. ZipServ introduces Tensor-Core-Aware Triple Bitmap Encoding (TCA-TBE), a novel fixed-length format that enables constant-time, parallel decoding, together with a fused decompression-GEMM (ZipGEMM) kernel that decompresses weights on-the-fly directly into Tensor Core registers. This "load-compressed, compute-decompressed" design eliminates intermediate buffers and maximizes compute intensity. Experiments show that ZipServ reduces the model size by up to 30%, achieves up to 2.21x kernel-level speedup over NVIDIA's cuBLAS, and expedites end-to-end inference by an average of 1.22x over vLLM. ZipServ is the first lossless compression system that provides both storage savings and substantial acceleration for LLM inference on GPUs.