Comment by jchandra

Fair point, the gap isn’t huge in that plot, and both degrade at low ratios. The difference is more in how they degrade: TopK can have sharper, localized failures, while HAE tends to be a bit more smooth. That doesn’t always show up strongly in average MSE.

That said, the gains are modest right now, this is still a research prototype exploring the tradeoff, and there’s clearly more work to be done.