arXiv AI

G$^2$PTQ: Improving LLM Post-Training Quantization with Generalized Gradient Compensation

G$^2$PTQ is a post‑training quantization framework that improves large language models by combining first‑ and second‑order information in a globally supervised, block‑wise optimization. It refreshes gradient and Hessian estimates before each Transformer block and uses a trust‑region scaling mechanism to stabilize gradient steps, preventing exploding weight updates. The method achieves better alignment with full‑precision models and outperforms state‑of‑the‑art baselines across various model families and bit‑widths.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 17

Robust Ultra Low-Bit Post-Training Quantization via Stable Diagonal Curvature Estimate

The paper introduces DASH-Q, a post‑training quantization method that uses a diagonal Hessian approximation and iterative weighted least squares to reduce noise in curvature estimates. By discarding noisy cross‑channel dependencies, DASH‑Q preserves salient feature power and achieves superior performance in ultra low‑bit quantization. Across five large language models, it improves zero‑shot accuracy by an average of 7.01% and up to 14.01% over the strongest baselines, even with very small calibration datasets.

By Jaemin Kim, Sungkyun Kim, Junyeol Lee, Jiwon Seo
arXiv AI
Sep 2

REAL-Q: E2E LLM Quantization via Dynamic Gradient Descent

REAL-Q introduces a new post‑training quantization approach for large language models that replaces the traditional single closed‑form second‑order solver with a fine‑grained, dynamic block‑wise gradient descent applied after every 128‑column block. By aligning the surrogate loss with the end‑to‑end objective and using a sliding window for smooth cross‑layer transitions, REAL‑Q mitigates error propagation and information misalignment. Experiments on LLaMA‑3.1 and Qwen3 show up to ~49% reduction in end‑to‑end KL divergence compared to state‑of‑the‑art methods.

By Qian Zhang, Yaoming Li, Zhewen Tan, Yanshu Wang, Heng Lu, Kun Su, Zongwei Lv, Wenhan Yu, Yongge Ma, Yinjun Han, Ruikuang Liu, Tong Yang