MiX: Micro-Inverted-Scaling for End-to-End Low-Bit Vision-Language Model Acceleration proposes a new quantization format that inverts the traditional microscaling approach by assigning private exponents to each element and a shared mantissa. The adaptive dual-format MiX-MX inference framework maps this format to a custom accelerator, replacing multipliers with shifters. Evaluations show that 4.5-bit MiX matches or surpasses NVFP4 accuracy on multimodal benchmarks while improving area efficiency by 25% and delivering 2.3–4.5× speedup with 1.4–2.9× energy reduction compared to the Focus accelerator.
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:2605. 24391v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As the demand for deep learning grows, cost reduction through quantization has become essential for both training and inference.
By Dahoon Park, Jahyun Koo, Sangwoo Hwang, Jaeha Kung
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
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:2509. 10334v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision Transformers (ViTs) have recently achieved strong results in semantic segmentation, yet their deployment on resource-constrained devices remains limited due to their high memory footprint and computational cost.
By Jordan Sassoon, Michal Szczepanski, Martyna Poreba
arXiv:2605. 26092v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Transformers (ViTs) on edge devices is significantly constrained by memory limitations and the critical timing bottlenecks introduced by dense Multiply-Accumulate (MAC) arrays.
By Maoyang Xiang, Tao Luo, Bo Wang
arXiv:2607. 08029v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The emergence of vision language models with fewer than 3 billion parameters has accelerated the implementation of on-device multimodal intelligence.
By Hyeju Shin, Chorwon Kim, Ryangsoo Kim, Hark Yoo, Jaein Kim
The paper introduces H-Scale, a lightweight post-processing technique for refining per-group scaling factors in NVFP4 quantized large language models. By using a diagonal second-order proxy from calibration activations, H-Scale selects hardware-valid scales that directly target layer output perturbation rather than just weight reconstruction error. Experiments on mainstream LLMs show that H-Scale improves NVFP4 baselines and brings several variants closer to BF16 performance without adding inference overhead.
By Hao Yu, Zheng Li, Dayiheng Liu, Jianwei Zhang
arXiv:2410. 13056v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success across a wide range of language tasks, but their deployment on edge devices remains challenging due to the substantial memory requirements imposed by their large parameter sizes.
By Zihan Chen, Bike Xie, Jundong Li, Cong Shen
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
ProQuant introduces a progressive quantization‑aware training framework for low‑bit multi‑modal large language models (MLLMs), addressing the performance drop seen with post‑training quantization at low bit‑widths. The method includes a self‑relabeling scheme to align fine‑tuning data with pre‑training distributions and a progressive block activation mechanism that prioritizes multi‑modal understanding, guided by a vision‑sensitive factor to identify critical layers. Experiments on 2B–8B models show ProQuant outperforms existing techniques, achieving up to a 6.6% accuracy gain in W4A8 Qwen3‑VL‑2B‑Instruct with only ~1% drop from full precision.
By Yufei Xue, Yushi Huang, Jiawei Shao, Pingcheng Dong, Yonghao Tan, Shiyao Li, Kwang-Ting Cheng, Jun Zhang