Sheldon Liang, Ali Taghibakhshi, Saurav Muralidharan, Sharath Turuvekere Sreenivas, Ashwath Aithal, Pavlo Molchanov, Nima Tajbakhsh
LLM pruning must preserve quality while meeting hardware- and workload-specific constraints on latency, throughput, and memory. Existing pruning workflows often target parameter counts, requiring practitioners to manually select model sizes that meet latency, throughput, and GPU memory limits. However, parameter count alone does not predict these metrics, which depend on the model architecture, workload, hardware, and serving engine. We introduce AutoCompress, a hardware-guided compression framework that directly incorporates such constraints into differentiable architecture search. AutoCompress jointly optimizes global and per-layer structure to produce heterogeneous architectures, guided by serving-engine cost models validated against end-to-end latency, throughput, and memory measurements. We evaluate AutoCompress on long-context local coding, batched datacenter serving, and latency-sensitive in-game interaction. Compared to the state-of-the-art Minitron pruning framework, AutoCompress improves average accuracy across eight benchmarks by 6.57, 2.35, and 0.57 percentage points on RTX 5070, RTX 5080, and H100, respectively. AutoCompress also compresses Nemotron 3.5 Super from 120B to 74B parameters for single-B200 BF16 serving at 128K context, retaining 95% of its mean benchmark score.
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) hold promise for zero-shot video task-progress estimation in robot learning, yet existing frameworks frequently suffer from confirmation bias, hallucinating progress in failed executions due to implicit success assumptions or relative temporal ranking designs. Naive prompting of frontier models collapses into a binary success detector that fails to capture nuanced, non-linear progress and failures. While post-training approaches can mitigate this through explicit training, they demand expensive real-world robotics data and require computationally intensive post-training for every individual base model. To resolve these limitations, we introduce D&A (Describe & Assess): our approach decouples progress estimation into an objective, task-grounded textual description of scene dynamics followed by an assessment phase using explicit rubrics. By compelling the VLM to synthesize an explicit, text-based definition of absolute success before scoring, the framework anchors evaluations to an external, global criterion rather than the video's internal timeline. Empirical results demonstrate that our method calibrates zero-shot estimates and mitigates confirmation bias, providing fine-grained, partial progress metrics that accurately penalize failed executions while correctly interpolating successful runs. Being purely prompt-based, D&A generalizes across tasks, embodiments, and benchmarks---matching or surpassing post-trained reward models---and its reward estimates enable efficient downstream reinforcement learning.