Boosted decision trees (BDTs) are widely used in latency-critical applications, but efficient hardware deployment remains challenging. Existing designs often rely on uniform or manually tuned fixed-point formats, which can introduce unnecessary hardware cost or accuracy loss.
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:2606. 26650v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper, we present CAT-Q, Cost-efficient and Accurate Ternary Quantization, for compressing and accelerating LLMs.
By Shigeng Wang, Chao Li, Yangyuxuan Kang, Jiawei Fan, Anbang Yao
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:2506.11784v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Vision Transformers (ViTs) are essential in computer vision but are computationally intensive, too. Model quantization, particularly to low bit-wid...
By Guang Liang, Xinyao Liu, Jianxin Wu
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:2608. 07019v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-training quantization (PTQ) is widely used to reduce the memory and computational cost of large language models.
By Yongge Ma, Guoan Wang, Feiyu Wang, Yaoming Li, Qian Zhang, Zihan Yan, Yinjun Han, Tong Yang
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:2606. 10531v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantization-aware training (QAT) is essential for extremely low-bit large language models (LLMs).
By Haoyu Wang, Xingyu Yu, Haiyan Zhao, Fengxiang Wang, Xu Han
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
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
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