arXiv Machine Learning

SQuaT: Self-Supervised Knowledge Distillation via Student-Aware Quantized Teacher Features

arXiv:2608. 10709v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) enables the deployment of quantized models with minimal accuracy degradation.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 25

CAT-Q: Cost-efficient and Accurate Ternary Quantization for LLMs

In this paper, we present CAT-Q, Cost-efficient and Accurate Ternary Quantization, for compressing and accelerating LLMs. Unlike existing state-of-the-art ternary quantization methods that rely on data-intensive and costly quantization-aware training to mitigate severe performance degradation, CAT-Q is a simple yet effective post-training quantization scheme that is readily applicable to LLMs with diverse architectures and model sizes.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

Why Does Post-Training Quantization Work?

Post‑training quantization compresses large language models by storing weights at reduced precision, introducing errors into hidden states that could accumulate with depth. However, pretrained models accumulate far less hidden‑state error than randomly initialized ones, largely preserving downstream performance. The study identifies two key mechanisms: (1) each layer’s new error tends to oppose inherited error, partially canceling it, and (2) the LM‑head geometry preserves high‑rank token scores, mitigating output changes.

By Yuxiang Chen, Michael Beyer, Jun Zhu, Jianfei Chen
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 1

A Target-Centric Survey of Quantization-Aware Training

The paper presents a target‑centric survey of Quantization‑Aware Training (QAT), a technique that simulates quantization during model training to produce low‑bit models with accuracy comparable to full‑precision ones. It systematically reviews existing QAT methods using a target‑centric taxonomy, highlighting differences in error characteristics, numerical formats, and strategy transferability across targets. The survey also summarizes QAT evaluation paradigms, discusses optimization and deployment challenges, and outlines potential future research directions.

By Jiamin Song, Mengjie Zhao, Zijing Wang, Yongkang Liu, Qian Li, Shi Feng, Feiliang Ren, Daling Wang, Hinrich Sch\"utze
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 Machine Learning
2d ago

QATFactory: A Versatile, Deployment-Aligned Framework for Quantization-aware Training and Distillation of LLMs

arXiv:2609.39223v2 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) inference is increasingly moving toward lower precision to realize the throughput of hardware accelerators, but aggressive p...

By Weili Xu, Jisen Li, Yuqing Jian, Chenxi Li, Zhizhou Sha, Yifan Yu, Qingyang Wu, Chenfeng Xu, Zhongzhu Zhou, Tianyi Zhang, Ben Athiwaratkun