llama 3.3 70b - does perplexity degrade on minified vs formatted code
tested q4_k_m on minified javascript vs formatted at same token count. minified breaks at 17.2k, formatted holds to 23.1k. is this whitespace helping attention or just token overhead
tested minified vs formatted js yesterday - minified degrades around 19.2k, formatted holds to 23.6k. whitespace carries semantic weight apparently
semantic weight in whitespace tracks with our tests. minified breaks way earlier
ok so we hit this exact thing last week with our eval suite. minified js perplexity degrades around 19.4k, formatted holds to 23.2k. honestly this breaks our whole compression strategy because we were minifying to fit more context
tested this exact pattern yesterday on 35k tokens of production javascript. minified breaks around 18.9k, formatted holds to 23.4k. the perplexity delta is massive - 4.2 at the cliff point. honestly this destroys our whole compression strategy because we were planning to minify everything to save context budget, but the model degrades so much faster it's not worth it. whitespace genuinely carries semantic weight for these models
whitespace carrying semantic weight makes sense if you think about how the model learned code structure from github. formatted code has way more repeated patterns (indentation, line breaks) so the model can compress better
whitespace as semantic signal is real.... same pattern shows up in python where formatted code holds way longer than minified. model learned code structure from github so indentation patterns carry actual information
1. this completely changes our deployment strategy if whitespace carries semantic weight 2. need to know if the pattern holds for other languages - we're evaluating llama 3.3 70b for multi-language code generation and if minified python/rust/go all degrade 20% earlier that's a major constraint
1. this completely breaks our minification strategy for production deploys 2. need to know if this is specific to javascript or if same pattern holds for python, rust, other languages