arXiv Machine Learning

SoftWater: Class-Aware Rate Allocation for Softmax Quantization

arXiv:2608. 12026v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-training quantization pipelines routinely leave the softmax output layer in high precision.

arXiv AI
6d ago

Softmax Reparameterization for Output-Head Quantization

The paper introduces a post‑training softmax reparameterization technique that selects a functionally equivalent output head before quantization. By subtracting a scalar multiple of the vocabulary‑row mean from each output row and tuning this coefficient via validation KL, the method preserves the full‑precision softmax distribution while enabling efficient W4 quantization. Experiments on seven heads show significant error reductions and latency improvements, with the approach remaining complementary to other quantization strategies and transferable across datasets.

By Asim Kadav, Christian Flores, Chirag Arora, Varun Kotte, Hongbo Zheng, Lan Yan, Priya Shanmugasundaram, Tracy Holloway King
arXiv AI
Jun 4

Recover-LoRA for Aggressive Quantization: Reclaiming Accuracy in 2-Bit Language Models via Low-Rank Adaptation with Knowledge Distillation on Synthetic Data

arXiv:2606. 04238v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Aggressive weight quantization to 2-bit precision offers substantial throughput and memory gains for large language model (LLM) inference, but typically incurs severe accuracy degradation.

By Devleena Das, Rajeev Patwari, Elliott Delaye, Ashish Sirasao
arXiv AI
Jul 7

HiFA4: Training-Free 4-bit FlashAttention on Ascend HIF4 NPUs for LLM Inference

arXiv:2607. 04302v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present HiFA4, a post-training operator-level design that executes both QK^T and PV in FlashAttention as 4-bit HIF4 Cube GEMMs for LLM inference on Ascend NPUs, while maintaining the online softmax state in FP16.

By Hui Dong, Yanzhao Li, Jie Gao, Chunlu Li, Zhiyuan Zhang, Yupeng Sun, Zhenyuan Chen, Zhiqiang Zou