Nacrith: Neural Lossless Compression via Ensemble Context Modeling and High-Precision CDF Coding
Roberto Tacconelli · Feb 23, 2026 · Citations: 0
How to use this page
Coverage: StaleUse this page to decide whether the paper is strong enough to influence an eval design. If the signals below are thin, treat it as background context and compare it against the stronger hub pages before making protocol choices.
Paper metadata checked
Feb 24, 2026, 11:10 AM
StaleProtocol signals checked
Feb 24, 2026, 11:10 AM
StaleSignal strength
Low
Model confidence 0.35
Abstract
We present Nacrith, a lossless compression system that combines a 135M-parameter transformer language model (SmolLM2-135M) with an ensemble of lightweight online predictors and a 32-bit arithmetic coder, achieving the best compression results among the systems evaluated in this study on natural language text. Beyond the base LLM-plus-arithmetic-coding paradigm, Nacrith introduces several contributions: (1) a CDF precision upgrade from 2^16 to 2^24 that eliminates ~75% of quantization overhead caused by minimum-probability floors in large vocabularies; (2) a token-level N-gram model for fast local predictions; (3) an adaptive log-space bias head correcting per-document LLM errors via online gradient descent; (4) confidence-based LLM skip for accelerating highly predictable tokens; (5) a hybrid binary format (NC06) extending neural compression to arbitrary binary files--to our knowledge a first among LLM-based compressors; (6) a llama cpp inference backend achieving ~7x faster single-token decode than PyTorch; (7) parallel multi-GPU compression across up to 8 workers; and (8) native KV cache sliding window reducing per-slide cost by ~37x. The system requires only ~500 MB of GGUF weights and ~1.2 GB VRAM per worker, running on consumer GPUs. On alice29 (Canterbury Corpus, 152 KB), Nacrith achieves 0.918 bits per byte (bpb)--outperforming gzip by 3.1x, bzip2 by 2.5x, CMIX v21 by 44%, and ts_zip by 20%, while compressing below the 0th-, 1st-, and 2nd-order byte-level Shannon entropy bounds. On enwik8 (100 MB), Nacrith achieves 0.9389 bpb (11.74%), surpassing ts_zip (~1.11 bpb) by 15% and FineZip (1.024 bpb) by 8% despite using a 60x smaller model with no fine-tuning. An out-of-distribution (OOD) evaluation on a document published after the model's training cutoff confirms these gains are not memorization artifacts, achieving 0.723 bpb on unseen text.