LC-QAT: Data-Efficient 2-Bit QAT for LLMs via Linear-Constrained Vector Quantization
arXiv:2606. 10531v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantization-aware training (QAT) is essential for extremely low-bit large language models (LLMs).
The paper introduces Trainable Vector Quantization (TVQ), a method that uses straight-through estimation to allow gradient descent optimization of vector-quantized large language models. TVQ reformulates VQ with trainable latent weights, enabling arbitrary objective minimization and is applied in a block-wise knowledge distillation framework to balance quality and training efficiency. Experiments show TVQ achieves state‑of‑the‑art low‑bit post‑training quantization, achieving near‑lossless 2‑bit quantization for LLaMA2‑70B with only a 1% accuracy drop on question‑answering benchmarks.
arXiv:2606. 10531v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantization-aware training (QAT) is essential for extremely low-bit large language models (LLMs).
arXiv:2606. 07819v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recently, the efficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs) deployment has become a critical concern in practical applications.
arXiv:2606. 04063v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deploying large language models (LLMs) is challenging due to their significant memory and computational requirements.
arXiv:2505.10202v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success but face significant computational and memory challenges, particularly due to their e...
The paper introduces the "Compression Trinity," a unified framework that jointly applies sparsity, quantization, and low‑rank approximations to compress large language models. It presents several methods—MKOR, SLoPe, OPTIMA, PATCH, and SLiM—that leverage these three pillars to accelerate training, reduce memory bandwidth, and recover accuracy, achieving significant speedups and accuracy gains over existing techniques. The results demonstrate that combining all three compression strategies is essential for efficient, scalable, high‑performance LLM deployment.
Squeeze10-LLM is a staged mixed‑precision post‑training quantization framework that reduces 16‑bit LLM weights to an average of 1.6 bits per weight by assigning 80% of weights to 1 bit and 20% to 4 bits. It introduces Post‑Binarization Activation Robustness (PBAR), a weight significance metric that considers activation impact, and Full Information Activation Supervision (FIAS), a strategy that preserves activation information to limit error propagation. Experiments on LLaMA and LLaMA2 demonstrate that Squeeze10‑LLM achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance for sub‑2‑bit weight‑only quantization, raising average accuracy from 43% to 56% on six zero‑shot classification tasks.
arXiv:2606. 04620v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLMs have become the state-of-the-art algorithms for solving NLP tasks.
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit exceptional general language processing capabilities, but their memory and compute costs hinder deployment. Ternarization has emerged as a promising compression technique, offering significant reductions in model size and inference complexity.
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.
The paper introduces Message-Passing Quantization (MPQ), a new approach to post‑training quantization (PTQ) that treats row‑wise PTQ as posterior inference over discrete codebooks. Unlike existing solvers that commit each weight block to a single codeword early, MPQ maintains soft posterior information across blocks using vector approximate message passing and only hard‑codes decisions at the final stage. Experiments on 2‑bit lattice and 3‑/4‑bit scalar quantization for dense language models from the Llama, Qwen, and Mistral families show that MPQ improves perplexity and zero‑shot accuracy compared to strong hard‑decision baselines and works well with preprocessing techniques such as activation‑aware scaling and incoherence processing.
The paper examines weight-only post‑training quantization (PTQ) and finds that minimizing reconstruction loss does not always improve model performance, sometimes even harming it on calibration data. It shows that weights with low reconstruction loss on one distribution can perform worse when activation distributions shift. To address this, the authors introduce Distributionally Robust Quantization (DRQ), a refinement step that minimizes worst‑case reconstruction loss over a constrained set of activation distributions while keeping the quantization grid unchanged. Experiments demonstrate that DRQ improves models quantized by several PTQ methods across dense and mixture‑of‑experts large language models, offering better downstream performance without extra inference cost.
arXiv:2606. 13054v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit exceptional general language processing capabilities, but their memory and compute costs hinder deployment.