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The simple beauty of XOR floating point compression


I recently implemented a small program to visualize the inner workings of a scheme that compresses floating point timeseries by XORing subsequent values. The resulting visualizations are quite neat…

I recently implemented a small program to visualize the inner workings of a scheme that compresses floating point timeseries by XORing subsequent values. This is a fairly typical floating point time series which records the gradient norm at each iteration of a machine learning run. We can save a tiny amount of extra space if we treat it as a single precision floating point number to begin with since in that case we need one less bit to store the length of the nonzero subsequence.

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Photo of simple beauty

simple beauty

Photo of XOR

XOR