arXiv AI

CrowdCC: Jointly Benchmarking Corruption Robustness and Deployment Quantization in Crowd Counting

CrowdCC is a benchmark that jointly evaluates corruption robustness and deployment quantization for crowd‑counting models on edge devices. It introduces 23 deployment‑motivated corruptions at three severity levels, tests 26 models across four datasets, and measures performance in FP32, FP16, and INT8 precision on A100 TensorRT engines and Jetson Orin NX hardware. The study finds that capture‑chain corruptions cause the greatest degradation, INT8 quantization alters robustness unpredictably, and that model selection must consider both corruption robustness and deployment cost together.

arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 2

QATFactory: A Versatile, Deployment-Aligned Framework for Quantization-aware Training and Distillation of LLMs

arXiv:2609.39223v2 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) inference is increasingly moving toward lower precision to realize the throughput of hardware accelerators, but aggressive p...

By Weili Xu, Jisen Li, Yuqing Jian, Chenxi Li, Zhizhou Sha, Yifan Yu, Qingyang Wu, Chenfeng Xu, Zhongzhu Zhou, Tianyi Zhang, Ben Athiwaratkun
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 24

RAMP: Robust Adaptive Mixed-Precision Quantization for Edge CPU Vision Models

The paper introduces RAMP, a method for robust adaptive mixed‑precision quantization of vision models on edge CPUs. It evaluates 13 sensitivity metrics across four neural networks, finding that Jensen‑Shannon Divergence consistently identifies layers that can be safely quantized. Using K‑Means clustering on these metrics, RAMP achieves near‑lossless accuracy with an average 1.81× speed‑up, while cautioning against excluding low‑speed‑up layers that can fragment the computational graph.

By David Poblaci\'on-Criado, Dario Garcia-Gasulla, Eduardo Quinones
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 15

Sparsity-Adaptive Sharpness-Aware Minimization

The paper introduces Sparsity-Adaptive Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SA‑SAM), a method that adjusts the perturbation radius in sharpness-aware training to remain consistent as model sparsity increases. It also evaluates a Magnitude‑Weighted Hessian (MWH) importance metric derived from second‑order analysis. Experiments on CIFAR‑10‑C, CIFAR‑100‑C, and ImageNet‑100‑C show that SA‑SAM improves corruption robustness at 80–90% sparsity while maintaining clean accuracy, and the study reports inference throughput at deployment‑relevant sparsity levels.

By Shiryu Ueno, Yoshikazu Hayashi, Kunihito Kato
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 18

CodeQuant: Unified Clustering and Quantization for Enhanced Outlier Smoothing in Low-Precision Mixture-of-Experts

arXiv:2604. 10496v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Outliers have emerged as a fundamental bottleneck in preserving accuracy for low-precision large models, particularly within Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures that are increasingly central to large-scale language modeling.

By Xiangyang Yin, Xingyu Liu, Tianhua Xia, Bo Bao, Vithursan Thangarasa, Valavan Manohararajah, Eric Sather, Sai Qian Zhang
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Reliable Virtual Sensing: A Multi-Domain Benchmark for Robustness Under Sensor Failures

The paper introduces MuViS-C, a multi‑domain benchmark that evaluates the robustness of learning‑based virtual sensing models against ten common sensor failure modes, ranging from subtle drifts to catastrophic dropouts. It assesses models using average error, relative degradation, and worst‑case fragility across nine datasets from six domains, comparing six architectures (gradient‑boosted trees, convolution, recurrence, attention, and MLP‑mixing). The study finds that all models degrade under corruption, gradient‑boosted trees are most robust, and targeted robustification can improve attention models at the cost of nominal performance.

By Jens U. Brandt, Noah C. Puetz, Alexander Windmann, Marc Hilbert, Elena Raponi, Thomas B\"ack, Thomas Bartz-Beielstein
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 2

The Structure of Quantization Damage in LLMs: Why the Next Bit Should Be Spent Globally

The paper investigates where post‑training quantization (PTQ) harms large language models (LLMs) and how to best allocate a limited precision budget. By causally raising each layer to 8‑bit precision across nine open‑weight models, the authors find that quantization damage is diffuse rather than concentrated in specific task circuits or weight statistics, and that globally refining quantization granularity outperforms selectively protecting the most recoverable layers. They also observe that the residual accuracy loss is budget‑limited and that peak recovery locations correlate with architecture within families but not across families.

By Jundong Hu, Shekar Ramachandran