The paper argues that relying solely on zero‑shot task accuracy is insufficient for evaluating quantized large language models (LLMs) because accuracy ignores changes in the full predictive distribution. It proposes a distribution‑sensitive framework that measures fidelity loss by computing statistical distances—such as Jensen‑Shannon Divergence and Total Variation Distance—between the full‑vocabulary output distributions of a full‑precision BF16 reference and its quantized counterparts. Experiments across five foundation architectures and four reasoning benchmarks show that these divergence metrics increase with stronger quantization, revealing distributional drift that top‑1 accuracy fails to capture, and suggest that mixed‑precision Q4_K schemes can offer lower divergence than uniform Q4_0 at comparable memory usage.
By Shahzeb Qamar, Lorenz Sparrenberg, Christian Bauckhage, Baha Rababah, Carson Leung, Murat Kantarcioglu, Cuneyt Gurcan Akcora, Rafet Sifa
The paper investigates low‑bit quantization for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), showing that MXFP8 retains near‑lossless performance while 4‑bit formats like MXFP4 and HiF4 cause significant degradation. It identifies activation quantization as the main source of this loss and introduces Residual Fallback Quantization (RFQ), a lightweight framework that adds a quantized residual pathway to improve activation fidelity without architectural changes. Experiments on Wan2.2 and Qwen3‑VL demonstrate that RFQ recovers much of the performance gap to BF16 baselines across generation and reasoning tasks.
By Tanzila Rahman, Mehran Taghian Jazi, Yunke Peng, Zhuang Ma, Anandharaju Durai Raju, Yao Wang, Xing Huang, Hei Yi Mak, Shadan Golestan, Hoang Le, Yonghan Dong, Wei Guo, Yaoyuan Wang
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. 13054v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit exceptional general language processing capabilities, but their memory and compute costs hinder deployment.
By Zhixiong Zhao, Zukang Xu, Zhixuan Chen, Xing Hu, Zhe Jiang, Dawei Yang
As large language model inference shifts toward lower precision, post-training quantization (PTQ) becomes increasingly brittle, making quantization-aware training (QAT) essential for preserving model...
arXiv:2608. 13966v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As large language model inference shifts toward lower precision, post-training quantization (PTQ) becomes increasingly brittle, making quantization-aware training (QAT) essential for preserving model quality.
By Vincent Counathe, Ben Athiwaratkun, Christopher De Sa, Tianyi Zhang
arXiv:2606. 07819v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recently, the efficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs) deployment has become a critical concern in practical applications.
By Hoang-Loc La, Truong-Thanh Le, Amir Taherkordi, Phuong Hoai Ha
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.
By Mohammad Mozaffari
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.
By Qingcheng Zhu, Yangyang Ren, Linlin Yang, Yanjing Li, Sheng Xu, Haodong Zhu, Juan Zhang, Runqi Wang, Baochang Zhang
Post-training quantization lowers the memory footprint of Large Language Models (LLMs) and speeds up inference, which is why it is now common for on-device deployment. Most of what we know about its e...
arXiv:2607. 10855v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantization is a powerful strategy to build capable and resource-efficient large language models (LLMs) by reducing the bitwidth of the parameters.
By Sirine Ayadi, S\'andor Dar\'oczi, Stephan G\"unnemann, Bertrand Charpentier
Prohibitive computational and environmental costs impede the scalable deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs). Traditional compression techniques (sparsity, quantization, low-rank approximations) a...