arXiv Machine Learning

Fine-Tuning Low-Bit Models with Gradient in Quantized Code Space

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
Oct 26

MPQ: A Message-Passing View of Post-Training Quantization

The paper introduces Message-Passing Quantization (MPQ), a new approach to post‑training quantization (PTQ) that treats row‑wise PTQ as posterior inference over discrete codebooks. Unlike existing solvers that commit each weight block to a single codeword early, MPQ maintains soft posterior information across blocks using vector approximate message passing and only hard‑codes decisions at the final stage. Experiments on 2‑bit lattice and 3‑/4‑bit scalar quantization for dense language models from the Llama, Qwen, and Mistral families show that MPQ improves perplexity and zero‑shot accuracy compared to strong hard‑decision baselines and works well with preprocessing techniques such as activation‑aware scaling and incoherence processing.

By Yanshuo Chen, Chenxi Liu, Reza Shirkavand, Heng Huang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 2

WINDQuant: Weight-Informed Neural Decision-Making for Global Mixed-Precision LLM Quantization

arXiv:2605. 26660v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantization is an effective approach to reduce the memory footprint and inference cost of large language models (LLMs), yet maintaining performance in the ultra-low-bit regime remains challenging.

By Phong Nam Huu Nguyen, Khoi M. Le, Cong-Duy T Nguyen, Anh Tuan Luu, Thong Thanh Nguyen, Tho Quan
arXiv AI
Oct 9

When Lower Reconstruction Loss Hurts: Distributionally Robust Refinement for Low-Bit LLM Quantization

The paper examines weight-only post‑training quantization (PTQ) and finds that minimizing reconstruction loss does not always improve model performance, sometimes even harming it on calibration data. It shows that weights with low reconstruction loss on one distribution can perform worse when activation distributions shift. To address this, the authors introduce Distributionally Robust Quantization (DRQ), a refinement step that minimizes worst‑case reconstruction loss over a constrained set of activation distributions while keeping the quantization grid unchanged. Experiments demonstrate that DRQ improves models quantized by several PTQ methods across dense and mixture‑of‑experts large language models, offering better downstream performance without extra inference cost.

By Yanlong Zhao, Xiaoyuan Cheng, Huihang Liu, Baihua He, Xinyu Zhang, Harrison Bo Hua Zhu, Wenlong Chen, Li Zeng, Zhuo Sun
arXiv AI
Aug 28

GAMMA: Global Bit Allocation for Mixed-Precision Models under Arbitrary Budgets

GAMMA is a post‑training framework that learns module‑wise precision preferences for mixed‑precision quantization of large language models. It optimizes a teacher‑forced hidden‑state reconstruction objective under an augmented Lagrangian constraint and then projects the learned preferences into exact budget‑feasible discrete assignments via integer programming. Because the learned preferences encode a stable sensitivity ranking, a single training run can be reused for any deployment budget, reducing per‑budget adaptation from hours to minutes and outperforming fixed‑precision baselines and search‑based methods on Llama and Qwen models.

By Zhangyang Yao, Haiyan Zhao, Haoyu Wang, Xu Han