arXiv Computer Vision

SPHQuant: Efficient extreme low bit weight quantization for Vision-Language Models

SPHQuant introduces a rotation‑free spherical weight‑only quantization framework for Vision‑Language Models, decomposing 8‑dimensional weight vectors into sign, radius, and a positive unit direction. By isolating outlier magnitudes in the radius and allocating extra precision there, it mitigates accuracy loss at extreme low bit‑widths. The method also employs a compact positive‑direction codebook with angular fine‑tuning and a hardware‑friendly GEMV kernel, achieving state‑of‑the‑art performance while boosting decode throughput by 30.3% on RTX A6000 compared to QTIP.

arXiv AI
1d ago

TORQUE: Optimizing What (not) to Quantize Before and After Rotation

The paper introduces TORQUE, a framework that enhances quantization by jointly optimizing which coordinates to keep at high precision before and after applying uniform random rotations, all within a fixed bit budget. By preserving large input coordinates before rotation and the largest-magnitude coordinates after rotation, TORQUE reduces quantization error and allows efficient use of offline-optimized codebooks. The authors provide an error upper bound, prove that top‑k pre‑rotation retention is optimal for each k, and demonstrate improved accuracy‑storage tradeoffs in Gaussian models and practical tasks such as nearest‑neighbor retrieval, KV‑cache compression, and activation compression.

By Ran Ben Basat, Michael Mitzenmacher, Shay Vargaftik
arXiv AI
Aug 18

FluxBin: Flexible LUT-based Ultra-low-bit LLM Inference by Algorithm-Kernel Synergy

arXiv:2608. 15602v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While binary quantization theoretically promises extreme compression and acceleration for Large Language Models (LLMs), existing research often overlooks the necessity of specialized hardware kernels, thus failing to unleash the full acceleration potential due to persistent reliance on expensive floating-point arithmetic or runtime dequantization overheads.

By Qingyao Yang, Runming Yang, He Xiao, Wendong Xu, Junyu Chen, Haobo Liu, Chenchen Ding, Ruihan Hu, Yik-Chung Wu, Ngai Wong