Compression Glossary

Browse 9 compression terms defined in plain English, from the cultural dictionary of computing.

9 Compression Terms

Archive
A packaged collection of files, often compressed and stored in a format such as zip, tar, or tar.gz for transfer, backup, or distribution. Archives are also...
Content Encoding
The representation or transformation applied to response content, often indicated in protocols like HTTP to show compression or alternate encodings such as...
Knowledge Distillation
A model compression technique where a smaller student learns to mimic a larger teacher model. It influences how models are trained, evaluated, or served, and...
Kolmogorov Complexity
The length of the shortest program (in a fixed universal programming language) that produces a given string as output. A measure of the inherent information...
Neural Compression
Compression techniques that use neural networks to represent, encode, or reconstruct data more efficiently than traditional methods in some settings. The term...
Quantization
Reducing the precision of a model's numerical weights (e.g., from 32-bit to 4-bit) to decrease memory usage and increase inference speed, with minimal quality...
Shannon Entropy
A measure of the average information content (or unpredictability) in a message, measured in bits. Higher entropy means more randomness and less...
Shrink Ray
A joking metaphor for making something much smaller, simpler, or more contained. In engineering slang, it often appears when reducing scope, image size,...
Zip
A widely supported archive file format that combines multiple files into a single container with optional DEFLATE compression. Also refers to the higher-order...

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