arXiv:2607. 27704v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) continue to demonstrate exceptional capabilities across various domains, the challenge of achieving energy-efficient and accurate inference becomes increasingly critical.
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.
ConQuR introduces a lightweight post‑training rotation calibration for large language model activation quantization. By learning orthogonal rotations that align normalized activations with the corners of an inscribed hypercube, the method distributes activation energy evenly and can be updated online without storing activations. Experiments on Llama‑2 and Llama‑3 models (3B–70B) show competitive or improved perplexity and reasoning performance while avoiding costly training or large offline storage.
arXiv:2507. 23035v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across a wide range of applications, but demand substantial memory and compute resources during inference.
HARP (Hadamard‑Preconditioned Adaptive Rotation Processor) is a learnable, structured two‑sided orthogonal processor that replaces fixed randomized Hadamard transforms in post‑training quantization of large language models. By representing rotations as sparse butterfly‑like block‑orthogonal stages and supporting mixed‑radix schedules, HARP adapts the quantization basis to each layer and calibration distribution while maintaining full‑precision equivalence. Across 2–4‑bit settings on Llama models from 1B to 70B, HARP consistently improves perplexity, delivers the strongest zero‑shot gains at 2 bits, and preserves deployment efficiency—achieving 128 tokens per second on Llama 2 7B at 2 bits, roughly 90% of RHT throughput and over twice the speed of FP16.
Flash-dLLM is a training‑free inference acceleration framework that improves the speed and memory efficiency of Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs). It tackles GPU memory I/O bottlenecks by introducing an I/O‑aware fused KV‑cache kernel and then employs a draft‑and‑verify decoding strategy that uses the dLLM itself as both drafter and verifier. Experiments on mathematical reasoning and code‑generation tasks show Flash‑dLLM outperforms existing acceleration methods, achieving up to 11.0× speedups over the Elastic‑Cache baseline.
arXiv:2606. 15652v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: 4-bit quantization significantly reduces the memory footprint and accelerates the inference of large language models (LLMs).
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.
The paper "LLM Inference in a Flash!" proposes an integer‑only quantization scheme and a dictionary‑based KV cache compression technique to enable large language model inference on compute‑in‑flash (CIF) devices. By eliminating floating‑point operations and reducing KV cache traffic through sparse dictionary coding, the authors achieve minimal accuracy loss while cutting dynamic KV cache traffic by 15× on Llama‑3.1‑8B and Qwen‑2.5‑7B models.
The paper introduces MiX, a micro‑inverted‑scaling format that replaces shared exponents with shared mantissas to avoid microscaling collapse in low‑bit vision‑language models. An adaptive dual‑format inference framework (MiX‑MX) maps this format to a custom accelerator, replacing multipliers with shifters. Experiments show 4.5‑bit MiX matches or outperforms NVFP4 accuracy while improving area efficiency by 25 % and delivering 2.3–4.5× speedup with 1.4–2.9× energy savings over the Focus accelerator.
MiX: Micro-Inverted-Scaling for End-to-End Low-Bit Vision-Language Model Acceleration proposes a new quantization format that inverts the traditional microscaling approach by assigning private exponents to each element and a shared mantissa. The adaptive dual-format MiX-MX inference framework maps this format to a custom accelerator, replacing multipliers with shifters. Evaluations show that 4.5-bit MiX matches or surpasses NVFP4 accuracy on multimodal benchmarks while improving area efficiency by 25% and delivering 2.3–4.5× speedup with 1.4–2.9× energy reduction compared to the Focus accelerator.
The paper reports the development of 2‑bit microkernels for CPUs and mixed‑precision 2‑bit kernels for Intel Xe2 GPUs, achieving near‑roofline performance. Integrated into LLM inference pipelines, these kernels deliver up to 7× speedup over 16‑bit inference on CPUs and 6.7× on GPUs, surpassing the current state‑of‑the‑art bitnet.cpp runtime by 2.2×. The work demonstrates that ultra‑low‑bit LLM models can be deployed efficiently, offering significant gains in latency, memory, throughput, and energy consumption.
The Transformer Accelerator (TFA) is a synthesizable, parameterizable INT8 memory‑to‑memory engine designed for transformer inference and machine translation. It features a one‑time‑multiplexed datapath that handles prompt processing and autoregressive generation, and implements key operations such as matrix multiplication, softmax, RMSNorm, and elementwise functions through eight 512‑bit macro‑op descriptors. In extensive verification, TFA achieved zero mismatches across 25 tests and 34 constrained‑random runs, matched floating‑point references on multiple translation tasks, and delivered a 20× speedup over a 22‑thread CPU while projecting significant energy reductions in larger designs.