Fine-tuning LLMs to 1.58bit: extreme quantization made easy

Making LLMs even more accessible with bitsandbytes, 4-bit quantization and QLoRA

Introducing AutoRound: Intel’s Advanced Quantization for LLMs and VLMs

A Target-Centric Survey of Quantization-Aware Training

The paper presents a target‑centric survey of Quantization‑Aware Training (QAT), a technique that simulates quantization during model training to produce low‑bit models with accuracy comparable to full‑precision ones. It systematically reviews existing QAT methods using a target‑centric taxonomy, highlighting differences in error characteristics, numerical formats, and strategy transferability across targets. The survey also summarizes QAT evaluation paradigms, discusses optimization and deployment challenges, and outlines potential future research directions.

CAT-Q: Cost-efficient and Accurate Ternary Quantization for LLMs

arXiv:2606. 26650v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper, we present CAT-Q, Cost-efficient and Accurate Ternary Quantization, for compressing and accelerating LLMs.

MXSens: Sensitivity-Aware Mixed-Precision Quantization for Efficient LLM Inference

arXiv:2607. 17733v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: 4-bit quantization enables efficient LLM inference, but suffers from significant accuracy degradation due to outliers.

CAT-Q: Cost-efficient and Accurate Ternary Quantization for LLMs

In this paper, we present CAT-Q, Cost-efficient and Accurate Ternary Quantization, for compressing and accelerating LLMs. Unlike existing state-of-the-art ternary quantization methods that rely on data-intensive and costly quantization-aware training to mitigate severe performance degradation, CAT-Q is a simple yet effective post-training quantization scheme that is readily applicable to LLMs with diverse architectures and model sizes.

Channel-Wise Mixed-Precision Quantization for Large Language Models

arXiv:2410. 13056v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success across a wide range of language tasks, but their deployment on edge devices remains challenging due to the substantial memory requirements imposed by their large parameter sizes.

GyRot: Leveraging Hidden Synergy between Rotation and Fine-grained Group Quantization for Low-bit LLM Inference

arXiv:2607. 27694v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Low-bit quantization is essential for efficient LLM inference, and both rotation and fine-grained group quantization have shown individual promise.

Quanto: a PyTorch quantization backend for Optimum

ReRound: Reconstructive Rounding to Resolve Midpoint Ambiguity in Calibration-Free LLM Quantization

arXiv:2608. 11045v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: ReRound (Reconstructive Rounding) is a post-training quantization method that addresses the midpoint ambiguity inherent in standard round-to-nearest (RTN) schemes when quantizing weights near the centers of quantization intervals.

Squeeze10-LLM: Squeezing LLMs' Weights by 10 Times via a Staged Mixed-Precision Quantization Method

Squeeze10-LLM is a staged mixed‑precision post‑training quantization framework that reduces 16‑bit LLM weights to an average of 1.6 bits per weight by assigning 80% of weights to 1 bit and 20% to 4 bits. It introduces Post‑Binarization Activation Robustness (PBAR), a weight significance metric that considers activation impact, and Full Information Activation Supervision (FIAS), a strategy that preserves activation information to limit error propagation. Experiments on LLaMA and LLaMA2 demonstrate that Squeeze10‑LLM achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance for sub‑2‑bit weight‑only quantization, raising average accuracy from 43% to 56% on six zero‑shot classification tasks.

RateQuant: Optimal Mixed-Precision KV Cache Quantization via Rate-Distortion Theory

arXiv:2605. 06675v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models cache all previously computed key-value (KV) pairs during generation, and this KV cache grows linearly with sequence length, making it a primary memory bottleneck for serving.