arXiv Machine Learning

HeadGuard: Selective Head Protection for Low-Bit VLM KV-Cache Quantization

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 Machine Learning
Aug 28

Activation Outliers Matter: Robust Recovery for Quantized Multimodal LLMs

The paper investigates low‑bit quantization for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), showing that MXFP8 retains near‑lossless performance while 4‑bit formats like MXFP4 and HiF4 cause significant degradation. It identifies activation quantization as the main source of this loss and introduces Residual Fallback Quantization (RFQ), a lightweight framework that adds a quantized residual pathway to improve activation fidelity without architectural changes. Experiments on Wan2.2 and Qwen3‑VL demonstrate that RFQ recovers much of the performance gap to BF16 baselines across generation and reasoning tasks.

By Tanzila Rahman, Mehran Taghian Jazi, Yunke Peng, Zhuang Ma, Anandharaju Durai Raju, Yao Wang, Xing Huang, Hei Yi Mak, Shadan Golestan, Hoang Le, Yonghan Dong, Wei Guo, Yaoyuan Wang