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Winnow

Devpost

Inspiration

Tokens are the meter on every LLM bill, and almost all of them are waste. Spoken language, retrieved RAG context, and long documents are massively redundant — but the redundancy lives in different places. Some is low-information tokens ("um, so basically the idea is…"), some is irrelevant passages that a query never touches, and some is the sheer bit-width of the KV cache the model carries while it generates. No single paper kills all three. So instead of picking one compression technique and hoping, we built Winnow: a pipeline that runs several state-of-the-art compressors in parallel, merges their decisions, and then — optionally — hands the result to an LLM whose KV cache is itself compressed. Every stage is independently justified by a recent paper; the contribution is making them compose. The Product: showcasing use cases of compression in "Test" -> users can upload multiple PDFs or talk and witness our hard-token pruning themselves. playground: tweak and play with our compression algorithm and compare and find the best one that works for your use case. There's plenty of variety, idk how we managed to get all these methods in and working in 24 hours lol.

What it does

(compression-specific) We tried our best to include every strong, parallelizable and patchable compression method we could find — and where no public repo existed, we re-implemented the paper ourselves from scratch (realistically, only LLMLingua shipped usable code). The papers Winnow builds on: LLMLingua-2 — Data Distillation for Efficient and Faithful Task-Agnostic Prompt Compression — arXiv:2403.12968 · repo LongLLMLingua — Accelerating and Enhancing LLMs in Long Context Scenarios via Prompt Compression — arXiv:2310.06839 · repo AttentionRAG — Attention-Guided Context Pruning in Retrieval-Augmented Generation — arXiv:2503.10720 (no public repo — self-implemented) LCLM — End-to-End Context Compression at Scale — arXiv:2606.09659 · repo TurboQuant — Online Vector Quantization with Near-Optimal Distortion Rate (KV-cache compression) — arXiv:2504.19874 · reference impl CompactPrompt — A Unified Pipeline for Prompt & Data Compression in LLM Workflows — arXiv:2510.18043 (explored; no public dataset to reproduce its style metric) Winnow compresses a prompt along two orthogonal axes and lets the user choose how far to push each one. 1. Token-space compression (which words survive). Given a piece of text, Winnow fans it out to two independent compressor families at once: LLMLingua-2 + LongLLMLingua. LLMLingua-2 is an extractive token classifier (a fine-tuned XLM-RoBERTa that labels each token keep/drop). LongLLMLingua adds the query-aware arm: a BGE cross-encoder reranker does coarse, question-aware document selection and reordering (to fight "lost-in-the-middle"), then the causal perplexity path compresses the survivors conditioned on the question. AttentionRAG. A faithful implementation of Attention-Guided Context Pruning in RAG (arXiv:2503.10720). It reformulates the query into an incomplete-answer template with a single "focal" blank, runs next-token prediction over each context chunk, and uses the focal token's summed-over-all-layers attention to rank tokens — keeping the sentences that hold the top-k. Chunks the model answers none on are dropped entirely. This requires a question to be run only when we are querying context (users are invited to try this in the Learn tab). Both arms produce per-token keep decisions. Winnow then merges them token-by-token over the original text, preserving chronology, under a boolean rule the user picks: intersection (keep a word only if both methods kept it — maximally aggressive) or union (keep if either did — safer, recall-oriented). The merge is a true alignment to one canonical token sequence (LLMLingua-2's word labels), not a fragile string-membership test, with a fallback to LLMLingua-only if AttentionRAG gates everything out so we never wipe the text. 2. Model-space compression (how the answer is generated). Once Winnow has the compressed string, the user chooses where it goes: Black box. Send the compressed prompt straight to a hosted API — Anthropic Claude or OpenAI GPT, picked per request. The savings are immediate and provider-agnostic, because the compressed prompt is just text. Self-hosted + TurboQuant. Route to our own Qwen model on Modal, generating with a TurboQuant-compressed KV cache (Google Research, ICLR 2026, arXiv:2504.19874) — a data-free random-rotation quantizer that drops the KV cache to ~4 bits (3–4× smaller) as a DynamicCache subclass, validated on Mistral-7B and Qwen2.5-14B. Self-hosted + LCLM + TurboQuant. Route to LCLM (End-to-End Context Compression at Scale, latent-context's released encoder→adapter→decoder checkpoints, ~2 weeks old at build time). LCLM compresses the long context into a handful of latent soft tokens that the decoder consumes as input embeddings — shrinking the KV cache's sequence length. TurboQuant then compresses the bits per entry of that same decoder cache. The two are orthogonal, so the savings multiply: fewer KV entries × fewer bits each. The net effect: token-level pruning before the model, sequence-length and bit-width compression inside it — three independent papers stacked end to end.

How we built it

Compression workers on Modal GPUs. LLMLingua-2/LongLLMLingua, AttentionRAG, TurboQuant, and LCLM+TurboQuant each run as a warm Modal A100 worker, tied to a FastAPI server's lifecycle so models load once at startup and real requests pay no cold-start cost. /compress fans LLMLingua and AttentionRAG out concurrently and merges; /generate routes between the Qwen-TurboQuant and LCLM-TurboQuant workers on an lclm flag. The merge engine (token_merge.py) is pure Python: it normalizes LLMLingua's labels, reconstructs each word's char-span in the original by an in-order forward scan, tests AttentionRAG's kept sentence-spans by char overlap, applies the union/intersection rule, and splices survivors back together preserving original spacing. TurboQuant is a drop-in DynamicCache subclass — Lloyd-Max Gaussian quantization with an optional outlier-channel path — so it slots straight in as any HF model's past_key_values, including the LCLM decoder. Frontend is a Next.js app that shows the raw vs. compressed diff live, token counts, % and $ saved, and an A/B Q&A box that asks the same question against both prompts to prove meaning survived.

Challenges we ran into

Pairing TurboQuant with LCLM. Getting TurboQuant's low-bit (down to ~3.5-bit outlier) quantization to drop cleanly into LCLM's decoder was the hardest integration. LCLM feeds the decoder inputs_embeds (the soft tokens), not token ids, and we had to confirm our TQCache survives that path and the encoder's single prefill without corrupting the latent memory block. Inventing the merge algorithm. Unionizing/intersecting two different compressors is not a set operation on strings — the two methods segment text differently. We had to align both to one canonical token sequence and operate on char-spans so the merge is order-preserving and unambiguous even with repeated words, plus a fallback so an empty AttentionRAG result never erases everything. Tuning LongLLMLingua. Choosing the right lead anchors / causal backbone and reranker for the question-aware arm took real iteration — what to condition on, how to reorder context against position bias, and where the causal path actually beats the cheaper extractive classifier. CompactPrompt had no public data. We tried to implement CompactPrompt's style-metric approach, but the paper shipped no public datasets to fit/evaluate the metric against, so we couldn't reproduce it faithfully and left it out rather than ship something unvalidated. Accomplishments we're proud of A working two-axis compressor: token-space (LLMLingua ∪/∩ AttentionRAG) and model-space (LCLM × TurboQuant) stacked in one pipeline. A genuinely novel merge between two heterogeneous compression algorithms that stays order-preserving and never destroys the text. TurboQuant validated end-to-end (3–4× KV compression, output matching FP16) and composing with LCLM so the KV savings multiply.

What we learned

The big wins come from compressing along different axes and stacking them — token count, sequence length, and bit-width are independent levers. Heterogeneous methods need a common canonical representation before you can combine them; alignment, not set math, is the real work. Faithfully reproducing a paper is gated by its artifacts: no public dataset (CompactPrompt) effectively means no faithful reimplementation.

What's next

Learned (rather than user-picked) routing between intersection/union and between black-box vs. self-hosted, per prompt and budget. Custom CUDA kernels for TurboQuant to turn the memory win into a latency win. Revisiting CompactPrompt if/when evaluation data becomes available. Built with Modal · FastAPI · Next.js · LLMLingua-2 · LongLLMLingua · AttentionRAG (arXiv:2503.10720) · LCLM (End-to-End Context Compression at Scale) · TurboQuant (arXiv:2504.19874) · BGE rerankers · Qwen · Anthropic Claude · OpenAI GPT · Deepgram

Analysis

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Technology

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AI coding agents

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Codebase size

Source size

525 KB

Source files

82

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