arXiv Machine Learning

OASIS: Outlier-Aware LUT-Based GEMM with Dual-Side Quantization for LLM Inference Acceleration

arXiv:2507. 23035v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across a wide range of applications, but demand substantial memory and compute resources during inference.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 18

CodeQuant: Unified Clustering and Quantization for Enhanced Outlier Smoothing in Low-Precision Mixture-of-Experts

arXiv:2604. 10496v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Outliers have emerged as a fundamental bottleneck in preserving accuracy for low-precision large models, particularly within Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures that are increasingly central to large-scale language modeling.

By Xiangyang Yin, Xingyu Liu, Tianhua Xia, Bo Bao, Vithursan Thangarasa, Valavan Manohararajah, Eric Sather, Sai Qian Zhang
arXiv AI
Aug 18

FluxBin: Flexible LUT-based Ultra-low-bit LLM Inference by Algorithm-Kernel Synergy

arXiv:2608. 15602v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While binary quantization theoretically promises extreme compression and acceleration for Large Language Models (LLMs), existing research often overlooks the necessity of specialized hardware kernels, thus failing to unleash the full acceleration potential due to persistent reliance on expensive floating-point arithmetic or runtime dequantization overheads.

By Qingyao Yang, Runming Yang, He Xiao, Wendong Xu, Junyu Chen, Haobo Liu, Chenchen Ding, Ruihan Hu, Yik-Chung Wu, Ngai Wong
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 22

SPHQuant: Efficient extreme low bit weight quantization for Vision-Language Models

SPHQuant introduces a rotation‑free spherical weight‑only quantization framework for Vision‑Language Models, decomposing 8‑dimensional weight vectors into sign, radius, and a positive unit direction. By isolating outlier magnitudes in the radius and allocating extra precision there, it mitigates accuracy loss at extreme low bit‑widths. The method also employs a compact positive‑direction codebook with angular fine‑tuning and a hardware‑friendly GEMV kernel, achieving state‑of‑the‑art performance while boosting decode throughput by 30.3% on RTX A6000 compared to QTIP.

By Kewei Zhang, Zheng Chen, Haotong Qin, Yulun Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

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 2

HBQ: Hierarchical Scaling Block Quantization with Hardware-Efficiency-Aware Design for Accurate LLM Inference

HBQ: Hierarchical Scaling Block Quantization with Hardware‑Efficiency‑Aware Design for Accurate LLM Inference proposes a new block‑quantization scheme that uses large blocks and low‑overhead significand scaling to balance hardware efficiency and accuracy. The authors demonstrate that larger blocks improve efficiency by amortizing dequantization and accumulation costs, while their SIG scaling compensates for the resulting accuracy loss. Experiments on a 28 nm ASIC accelerator show that HBQ achieves up to 4.6× higher area/energy efficiency than state‑of‑the‑art weight‑only quantization, with 1.5–3.0× speedup and 1.6–3.3× system energy reduction over existing BQ methods.

By Chun-Ting Chen, Dongmin Han, Hangyeol Mun, Jake Hyun, Arnab Raha, Amit Agarwal, Mark Anders, Mohamed Abdelfattah, Jae-sun Seo
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