How Divergence Becomes Decision Flips in Compressed Language Models
Compression reports summarize how far a compressed language model moved from the dense one, usually by a KL divergence; a deployment that relies on the dense model's outputs needs to know how many of its decisions changed. We show that total variation, not KL, answers this directly. Across 802 compressed and perturbed copies of 19 open models on five corpora and nine mechanically unrelated perturbation families, the rate at which the arg-max token changes (the \emph{flip rate}) tracks total variation at a ratio with median $1.05$, with no fitted constant. KL converts into flips only through its square root and a factor that varies fourfold across models and corpora, because KL averages ov...
| Authors | Beatriz Almeida Felicio |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 30 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 30 September 2026 |
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