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
Post-training quantization reduces the deployment cost of large language models, yet how severely a quantized model degrades is not determined by bit-width alone. We systematically study weight-only post-training quantization across bit-widths, quantization methods, model scales and downstream tasks on multiple model families.
arXiv:2608. 08188v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-training quantization reduces the deployment cost of large language models, yet how severely a quantized model degrades is not determined by bit-width alone.
By Chenxi Zhou, Pengfei Cao, Jinyu Ye, Bohan Yu, Haida Yu, Jiang Li, Jun Zhao, Kang Liu
arXiv:2607. 08734v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-training quantization is widely used to deploy large language models in resource-constrained settings, yet its evaluation relies almost exclusively on accuracy and perplexity.
By Baha Rababah, Cuneyt Gurcan Akcora, Carson K. Leung
arXiv:2606. 02288v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Massive activation spikes in Large Language Models (LLMs) severely degrade quantization by stretching dynamic ranges.
By Yung-Chin Chen, Chung Peng Lee, Ze-Wei Liou, Naveen Verma
arXiv:2606. 00206v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-training quantization (PTQ) is widely used to deploy large language models efficiently, but its effect on reasoning models is not well understood.
By Sanae Lotfi, Polina Kirichenko, Steven Li, Zechun Liu
Post-training quantization is widely used to deploy large language models in resource-constrained settings, yet its evaluation relies almost exclusively on accuracy and perplexity. We show that these metrics fail to capture behavioral changes induced by quantization.
arXiv:2606. 04945v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion large language models (DLLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive LLMs by generating text through iterative masked denoising with bidirectional context.
By Xin Yan, Aqiang Wang, Zhenglin Wan, Xingrui Yuand Ivor Tsang
Diffusion large language models (DLLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive LLMs by generating text through iterative masked denoising with bidirectional context. However, their large model sizes and iterative denoising process introduce substantial memory and computational overhead, motivating post-training quantization for efficient deployment.
arXiv:2609.37680v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: One of the current premises of mechanistic interpretability research is that detailed accounts of the geometry of neural network representations can...
By Sai Sumedh R. Hindupur, Hadas Orgad, Thomas Fel, Demba Ba
arXiv:2608. 04048v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Serving large language models (LLMs) under diverse deployment constraints requires flexible trade-offs between accuracy, memory footprint, and throughput.
By Yu Luo, Bo Dong, Wenhua Cheng, Haihao Shen
The paper investigates how transformer language models perform few‑shot learning for a simple addition task, showing that the ability is concentrated in a handful of attention heads. Using dimensionality reduction, the authors identify low‑dimensional subspaces—three heads with six‑dimensional spaces in Llama‑3‑8B‑Instruct—where specific dimensions encode the units digit via trigonometric patterns and magnitude via low‑frequency components. They also derive a mathematical identity linking aggregator and extractor subspaces, enabling tracking of information flow from examples to the final prediction.
By Xinyan Hu, Kayo Yin, Michael I. Jordan, Jacob Steinhardt, Lijie Chen