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:2606. 04349v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Conventional Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) methods struggle with 4-bit Omni-modal Large Language Models (OLLMs) due to the extreme distribution heterogeneity and disparate outlier patterns across modalities.
By Yue Wu, Changyuan Wang, Zixuan Wang, Shilin Ma, Yansong Tang
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit exceptional general language processing capabilities, but their memory and compute costs hinder deployment. Ternarization has emerged as a promising compression technique, offering significant reductions in model size and inference complexity.
arXiv:2507.17417v4 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: For large language models (LLMs), post-training quantization (PTQ) significantly reduces memory and computational overhead. Despite rapid advanceme...
By Yutong Liu, Cairong Zhao, Guosheng Hu
arXiv:2606. 13054v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit exceptional general language processing capabilities, but their memory and compute costs hinder deployment.
By Zhixiong Zhao, Zukang Xu, Zhixuan Chen, Xing Hu, Zhe Jiang, Dawei Yang
DualQuant introduces a dual‑scale, calibration‑free post‑training quantization framework that jointly optimizes weight‑reconstruction MSE and derives per‑channel activation rescalings, enabling effective 4‑bit weight and activation quantization without calibration data. The method employs a non‑differentiable optimization solved via variable splitting and block coordinate descent, supporting a wide range of formats including MX and NVFP4. Experiments on Llama and Qwen models show DualQuant matches or surpasses calibration‑based SmoothQuant and significantly outperforms other calibration‑free baselines, achieving up to 2.61× memory reduction and 2.46× throughput speedup on an RTX 4090.
By Mahsa Salmani, Sayeh Sharify, Hesham Mostafa
arXiv:2606. 07116v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Low-bit quantization has been widely adopted to accelerate the inference of large language models (LLMs) by significantly reducing computational cost and memory usage.
By Haoqi Wang, Lorenz K. Mueller, Jiawei Zhuang, Mathieu Salzmann, Lukas Cavigelli
arXiv:2609.00066v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: NVFP4 is an efficient microscaling format for low-bit inference, but activation outliers can still degrade quantization accuracy within NVFP4 blocks....
By Yishan Yao, Binjun Li, Hanling Yi, Pengyu Li, Xiaoqing Liu, Zihan Yang, Xiaotian Yu, Zhiwen Yu
arXiv:2603. 10444v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: FP4 training promises substantial memory and compute savings for large language models, but remains fragile because blockwise quantization is dictated by extreme activation magnitudes, which inflate dynamic range and compress long-tail signals.
By Hengjie Cao, Zhendong Huang, Mengyi Chen, Yifeng Yang, Fang Dong, Anrui Chen, Ruijun Huang, Xin Zhang, Mingzhi Dong, Yujiang Wang, Jinlong Hou, Qin Lv, Robert P. Dick, Yuan Cheng, Tun Lu, Fan Yang, Yixuan Chen, Li Shang
arXiv:2606. 04620v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLMs have become the state-of-the-art algorithms for solving NLP tasks.
By Pasindu Wickramasinghe, Achyuta Muthuvelan, Rachmad Vidya Wicaksana Putra, Minghao Shao, Muhammad Shafique
arXiv:2506. 04985v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) require substantial compute, and thus energy, at inference time.
By Boris van Breugel, Yelysei Bondarenko, Paul Whatmough, Markus Nagel
Squeeze10-LLM is a staged mixed‑precision post‑training quantization framework that reduces 16‑bit LLM weights to an average of 1.6 bits per weight by assigning 80% of weights to 1 bit and 20% to 4 bits. It introduces Post‑Binarization Activation Robustness (PBAR), a weight significance metric that considers activation impact, and Full Information Activation Supervision (FIAS), a strategy that preserves activation information to limit error propagation. Experiments on LLaMA and LLaMA2 demonstrate that Squeeze10‑LLM achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance for sub‑2‑bit weight‑only quantization, raising average accuracy from 43% to 56% on six zero‑shot classification tasks.
By Qingcheng Zhu, Yangyang Ren, Linlin Yang, Yanjing Li, Sheng Xu, Haodong Zhu, Juan Zhang, Runqi Wang, Baochang Zhang