arXiv AI

HARP: Hadamard-Preconditioned Adaptive Rotation Processor for Extreme LLM Quantization

HARP (Hadamard‑Preconditioned Adaptive Rotation Processor) is a learnable, structured two‑sided orthogonal processor that replaces fixed randomized Hadamard transforms in post‑training quantization of large language models. By representing rotations as sparse butterfly‑like block‑orthogonal stages and supporting mixed‑radix schedules, HARP adapts the quantization basis to each layer and calibration distribution while maintaining full‑precision equivalence. Across 2–4‑bit settings on Llama models from 1B to 70B, HARP consistently improves perplexity, delivers the strongest zero‑shot gains at 2 bits, and preserves deployment efficiency—achieving 128 tokens per second on Llama 2 7B at 2 bits, roughly 90% of RHT throughput and over twice the speed of FP16.

arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 15

PrismQuant: Optimal Null-Space Rotations for Grouped Quantizers

PrismQuant introduces a rotation framework that aligns the leading activation eigenspace with the constant group subspace of asymmetric grouped INT4 quantizers, optimizing the alignment via Ky Fan trace maximization and providing a closed‑form solution. The method employs compact Householder transformations for efficient, gradient‑free construction and applies a predictive range law to relate unaligned activation energy and group size to quantization variation. Experiments on large language models up to 70B parameters show PrismQuant achieving state‑of‑the‑art perplexity and accuracy, while delivering significant speedups and memory reductions in deployment scenarios.

By Yanlong Chen, Yining Chen, Song Zhang, Amirhossein Habibian, Yawei Li
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 11

RotaryQuant: Fitting 120B MoE Models on Consumer Hardware via Fused Compressed-Space Attention

arXiv:2608. 08081v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large mixture-of-experts (MoE) language models with 26--120 billion parameters exceed the memory capacity of consumer devices through three simultaneous pressures: resident weight matrices, key-value (KV) cache state that grows linearly with context, and dozens of expert sublayers that must be paged on demand.

By Anthony. Lui, Mohamed. Elsaied, N. P. Savani
arXiv AI
Jun 26

SharQ: Bridging Activation Sparsity and FP4 Quantization for LLM Inference

arXiv:2606. 26587v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Low-bit floating-point formats and semi-structured sparsity are increasingly supported by modern accelerators, yet combining them for LLM activation compression remains challenging: activations contain input-dependent outliers that dominate block scales in FP4 quantization, and directly applying N:M sparsity masks discards moderate values, coupling sparsification loss with quantization error.

By Haoqian Meng, Yilun Luo, Yafei Zhao, Wenyuan Liu, Huaqing Zheng, Xindian Ma, Peng Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

PRQuant: Permutation Residual Quantization for Low-Overhead Inference

PRQuant introduces a training‑free, low‑overhead method for low‑bit quantization of linear layers by permuting input channels that cause the largest quantization error into contiguous tail blocks and precomputing residual weight sub‑tensors. The approach eliminates the need for online gathering during inference, converting scattered residual compensation into a regular tail‑augmented GEMM and thereby reducing latency. Experiments show that PRQuant lowers down‑projection reconstruction error and outperforms standard MXFP4 and other post‑training quantization baselines on five downstream benchmarks, improving accuracy by up to 1.24 points on Qwen3‑4B‑Instruct‑2507.

By Peiran Wang, Anqi Wang, Jiaying Zhao, Huiwen Yang, Zhenyu Ming, Rongqian Wang, Yiwu Yao, Kun Tian, Xin Yao, Gong Zhang, Fan Yang, Zhongyi Huang
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 3

ConQuR: Corner Aligned Activation Quantization via Optimized Rotations for LLMs

ConQuR introduces a lightweight post‑training rotation calibration for large language model activation quantization. By learning orthogonal rotations that align normalized activations with the corners of an inscribed hypercube, the method distributes activation energy evenly and can be updated online without storing activations. Experiments on Llama‑2 and Llama‑3 models (3B–70B) show competitive or improved perplexity and reasoning performance while avoiding costly training or large offline storage.

By Chayne Thrash, Ali Abbasi, Soheil Kolouri
arXiv AI
Sep 30

ThinQuant: Scalable Rotation Learning for Weight and Activation Quantization of LLMs

ThinQuant introduces efficient rotation learning for low‑bit weight and activation quantization of large language models by reducing calibration data through a geometric selection of activations and solving a lower‑dimensional optimization problem via an ADMM algorithm. The method achieves comparable or better quantization performance with dramatically fewer calibration points, completing rotation calibration for Llama‑3‑70B in under 12 minutes and for Llama‑3.1‑405B in just over 2 hours on a single GPU. ThinQuant outperforms existing gradient‑free approaches such as DartQuant and gradient‑based SpinQuant in both speed and perplexity metrics on WikiText‑2.

By Mehdi Makni, Ryan Lucas, Rahul Mazumder