arXiv Machine Learning

Task-Aware QUBO Allocation for Mixed-Precision Quantization

The paper introduces a task‑aware quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) surrogate for mixed‑precision quantization, separating weight and activation profiles and incorporating a bit‑operation (BOP) cost and structural priors. Using this surrogate, a network‑wide allocation is refined via a direct validation‑based PROTES search, achieving a 37.192 dB PSNR on a compact NAFBlock denoiser with 4.035% routed‑layer BOPs, slightly better than a HAWQ‑style baseline. The study also shows that LSQ+ refinement narrows the quality gap and that the benefit of refinement varies with architecture and recovery strategy.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 17

PolyQ: Codesigning End-to-End Quantization Framework for Scalable Edge CPU LLM Inference

arXiv:2607. 14618v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: CPUs are the most universal target for on-device LLM inference, but existing low-bit quantization methods offer either coarse operating points or fine-grained mixed precision that is difficult to execute efficiently on CPUs.

By Hyunwoo Oh, Suyeon Jang, Hanning Chen, KyungIn Nam, Sanggeon Yun, Ryozo Masukawa, Mohsen Imani
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

Dynamic Expert Quantization for Scalable Mixture-of-Experts Inference

Dynamic Expert Quantization (DynaExq) is a runtime-aware mixed-precision serving system designed for single‑GPU Mixture‑of‑Experts (MoE) inference under a hard high‑bandwidth memory (HBM) envelope. It treats the problem as an online, budget‑constrained precision allocation task, keeping the most frequently used experts at higher precision while relegating the rest to low‑precision fallbacks. By estimating expert hotness from router traces and asynchronously promoting or demoting experts, DynaExq maintains a fully materialized expert set during the forward pass, improving accuracy and throughput compared to static post‑training quantization and offloading/prefetch baselines. whyItMatters":"DynaExq enables efficient deployment of large MoE models on memory‑limited GPUs by dynamically allocating precision based on runtime expert usage, thereby reducing memory footprint and latency while boosting accuracy and throughput."

By Kexin Chu, Dawei Xiang, Zixu Shen, Yiwei Yang, Zecheng Liu, Wei Zhang
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
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