svd-safety-mistral_7b_instruct_v02_up_basis_coeff_finetuned_keep_0p60

mistral_7b_instruct_v02_up_basis_coeff_finetuned_keep_0p60

mistralai/Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.2 compressed with Basis Sharing using the authors' code (TUDa-HWAI/Basis_Sharing, 1c021b6ce1d3), then recovered by LoRA on the coefficients alone.

• Parameters removed: 40% (keeping 60%)
• Realised parameter fraction: 0.599853515625
• Groups: 2 adjacent layers share one basis per weight type
• Shared types: v, k, q, up, gate — private (per-layer): down, o
• Pipeline: whitened SVD of each group's horizontally concatenated weights (the shared-basis fit) -> LoRA on the coefficients, bases frozen -> merge C' = C + (alpha/r)BA -> fold W = C' @ B to dense
• Calibration: 256 WikiText-2 sequences of 2048 tokens, seed 42 (upstream hard-codes seed 2023; this project calibrates every method at one seed)
• Recovery: LoRA r=8, alpha 16, 2 epochs, lr 0.0001, batch 64, on yahma/alpaca-cleaned

Only the coefficients were trained. The shared and per-layer bases are frozen and bit-identical to the compressed model, so every weight keeps rank <= k, each group still shares one basis, and the parameter budget survives recovery exactly. This is not Basis Sharing's own LoRA (wikitext, batch 1, q/v only): the project's alpaca recipe is used for every compressor so the recovery data is constant across methods.

Rotary embeddings. The LoRA trains the factored ShareLlama model, so its positional encoding matters. It uses transformers' own rotary tables built from this model's config, verified identical to stock Llama in float64 for base-500000 RoPE, llama3 scaling and grouped-query attention (tests/check_share_llama_exact.py).

Compressed through the ShareLlama path. Basis Sharing ships a Mistral module, but every tool here (fold, coefficient merge, factor export) reads the ShareLlama layout, so this checkpoint was compressed as a Llama. That is exact only because Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.2 has no sliding window: loaded as LlamaForCausalLM it produced logits identical to MistralForCausalLM (max |difference| 0.0, float32, up to 600 tokens). The published checkpoint is a normal MistralForCausalLM.

The factors are folded back to dense Mistral shapes, so this loads with stock transformers and needs no custom modelling code. It is rank-deficient, not smaller on disk.

Results

Over-refusal judging is reliable for this cell (XSTest-safe scored fraction 1.00; OR-Bench-Hard-1K scored fraction 1.00).

Full per-prompt outputs and raw metric files are in utility/ and safety/.

Evaluation

WikiText-2 perplexity; ARC-Easy/Challenge, HellaSwag, WinoGrande, OpenBookQA, PIQA and MathQA zero-shot; AdvBench and StrongREJECT generation judged by cais/HarmBench-Llama-2-13b-cls; over-refusal on XSTest-safe and OR-Bench-Hard-1K judged by allenai/wildguard. All generation uses the chat template, greedy.

Caveat

Compression at this ratio degrades refusal behaviour, which is what this cell exists to measure. Safety numbers from a model that has become degenerate are not evidence about alignment — read the over-refusal reliability line above alongside the ASR.