ProfilingAgent: Profiling-Guided Agentic Reasoning for Adaptive Model Optimization

Abstract

Foundation models face growing compute and memory bottlenecks, hindering deployment on resource-limited platforms. While compression techniques such as pruning and quantization are widely used, most rely on uniform heuristics that ignore architectural and runtime heterogeneity. Profiling tools expose per-layer latency, memory, and compute cost, yet are rarely integrated into automated pipelines. We propose ProfilingAgent, a profiling-guided, agentic approach that uses large language models (LLMs) to automate compression via structured pruning and post-training dynamic quantization. Our modular multi-agent system reasons over static metrics (MACs, parameter counts) and dynamic signals (latency, memory) to design architecture-specific strategies. Unlike heuristic baselines, ProfilingAgent tailors layer-wise decisions to bottlenecks. Experiments on ImageNet-1K, CIFAR-10, and CIFAR-100 with ResNet-101, ViT-B/16, Swin-B, and DeiT-B/16 show pruning maintains competitive or improved accuracy (about 1% drop on ImageNet-1K, +2% gains for ViT-B/16 on smaller datasets), while quantization achieves up to 74% memory savings with <0.5% accuracy loss. Our quantization also yields consistent inference speedups of up to 1.74 times faster. Comparative studies with GPT-4o and GPT-4-Turbo highlight the importance of LLM reasoning quality for iterative pruning. These results establish agentic systems as scalable solutions for profiling-guided model optimization.