arXiv AI

Signed Symmetric Quantization for Few-Bit Integers

arXiv:2607. 08779v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The signed integer alphabet contains one more negative representable value than positive.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 11

Structured Transforms for Low-Overhead Quantization of Language Models

The paper revisits Kashin‑decomposition‑based weight quantization for large language models, introducing an improved algorithm that uses a sign‑randomized Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) instead of a dense random orthogonal matrix. This change reduces per‑iteration cost from ≠(N^2) to ≠(N log N) and, combined with a greedy alternating‑update scheme, guarantees the four‑peak distribution needed for stable 2‑bit clustering while eliminating the need for multi‑restart k‑means. The resulting JAX pipeline, when paired with OPTQ‑style error compensation and QuIP‑style incoherence preprocessing, competes with state‑of‑the‑art quantization methods on OPT, Llama‑2, and Pythia at 4‑bit per channel, and remains numerically stable under stress configurations that cause other methods to diverge.

By Daria Cherniuk, Alexander Rudikov, Boris Kashin, Ivan Oseledets
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 18

D-Quant: Driftable Entropy Coding for KV Cache Quantization

The paper introduces D-Quant, a KV cache quantization framework that addresses the memory bottleneck of large language models by using a drift mechanism to convert entropy-coded representations into fixed-size bitstreams. This approach leverages the non-uniform distribution of KV cache values—after rotation and normalization, they approximate a normal distribution—allowing entropy coding to assign shorter codewords to frequent symbols while maintaining regular memory layouts suitable for parallel attention kernels. D-Quant thus aims to reduce memory footprint and bandwidth usage without sacrificing performance.

By Yi Su, Hong Liu, Guanghua Yu, Jianchen Zhu
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 11

Statistically-Lossless Quantization of Large Language Models

arXiv:2605. 02404v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Model quantization has become essential for efficient large language model deployment, yet existing approaches present clear trade-offs: methods such as GPTQ and AWQ achieve practical compression but are lossy, while lossless techniques preserve fidelity but lack inference acceleration.

By Michael Helcig, Eldar Kurtic, Dan Alistarh
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

Transforms for LLM Quantization: The Great Inversion and Format Co-Design

The paper surveys the use of linear, function‑preserving transforms in 4‑bit large‑language‑model (LLM) quantization, formalizing the underlying principle as the "Great Inversion"—the trade‑off between energy concentration favored by allocation‑flexible coding and within‑group flattening favored by grouped shared‑scale quantization. It reviews 200 works, classifies 43 transform methods by structure, data‑awareness, construction approach, and runtime cost, and examines how they interact with GPTQ rounding. The study also explores how different number formats (FP4, MXFP4, NVFP4) influence the optimal transform choice and outlines open research problems. "whyItMatters":"The survey clarifies the conflicting objectives in transform‑based LLM quantization and provides a practical guide for selecting transforms based on deployment regime, thereby informing future research and deployment strategies."

By Ehsan Jokar
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 17

PolyQ: Codesigning End-to-End Quantization Framework for Scalable Edge CPU LLM Inference

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