Post-training quantization lowers the memory footprint of Large Language Models (LLMs) and speeds up inference, which is why it is now common for on-device deployment. Most of what we know about its e...
arXiv:2606. 09864v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Key-value (KV) cache quantization is widely used to reduce Large Language Model (LLM) inference memory, yet existing evaluations solely focus on measuring perplexity and accuracy without assessing the safety impact.
By Bruce Changlong Xu, Adarsh Kumarappan, Mu Zhou
The study investigates how post‑training quantization (PTQ) affects proactive interference (PI) in large language models. Using bitsandbytes, the authors compare FP16, INT8, and INT4/NF4 precision across three instruction‑tuned models and find that INT4 quantization markedly degrades accuracy under high interference, with INT8 also incurring a smaller penalty in two of the three models. The degradation is linked to increased same‑key intrusion errors and originates in the quantized transformer backbone rather than the output layer.
By Shayan Shahrabi-Farahani (Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran), Dara Rahmati (Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran)
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
arXiv:2608. 08188v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-training quantization reduces the deployment cost of large language models, yet how severely a quantized model degrades is not determined by bit-width alone.
By Chenxi Zhou, Pengfei Cao, Jinyu Ye, Bohan Yu, Haida Yu, Jiang Li, Jun Zhao, Kang Liu
Post-training quantization reduces the deployment cost of large language models, yet how severely a quantized model degrades is not determined by bit-width alone. We systematically study weight-only post-training quantization across bit-widths, quantization methods, model scales and downstream tasks on multiple model families.
Post‑training quantization compresses large language models by storing weights at reduced precision, introducing errors into hidden states that could accumulate with depth. However, pretrained models accumulate far less hidden‑state error than randomly initialized ones, largely preserving downstream performance. The study identifies two key mechanisms: (1) each layer’s new error tends to oppose inherited error, partially canceling it, and (2) the LM‑head geometry preserves high‑rank token scores, mitigating output changes.
By Yuxiang Chen, Michael Beyer, Jun Zhu, Jianfei Chen
arXiv:2607. 08734v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-training quantization is widely used to deploy large language models in resource-constrained settings, yet its evaluation relies almost exclusively on accuracy and perplexity.
By Baha Rababah, Cuneyt Gurcan Akcora, Carson K. Leung
arXiv:2606. 06547v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) refine tokens iteratively but commit them irreversibly, leading to a "stability lag" where early decisions remain fragile even after being written.
By Haoyu Huang, Linlin Yang, Sheng Xu, Boyu Liu, Guodong Guo, Zhongqian Fu, Hang Zhou, Baochang Zhang
arXiv:2607. 09999v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We show that post-training quantization can silently alter how large language models reason even when task accuracy is preserved.
By Renuka Oladri, Mohan Vamsi Varadaraju Priya, Jerry Wu
arXiv:2607. 00908v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mixed-precision quantization (MPQ) has become a key technique for deploying large language models under stringent memory and compute constraints.
By Fei Wang, Chao Xue, Taoran Liu, Li Shen, Ye Liu, ChangXing Ding
arXiv:2512. 18934v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Catastrophic forgetting poses a fundamental challenge in continual learning, particularly when models are quantized for deployment efficiency.
By Michael S. Zhang, Rishi A. Ruia, Arnav Kewalram, Saathvik Dharmapuram, Utkarsh Sharma, Kevin Zhu