arXiv AI

RoleQ: Role-Aligned Scales for Converting Language Models to Ternary

arXiv:2610. 21808v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Weight quantization below four bits shrinks memory and bandwidth at a perplexity that looks acceptable, but often at the cost of factual knowledge and task accuracy.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 25

CAT-Q: Cost-efficient and Accurate Ternary Quantization for LLMs

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 Machine Learning
Oct 12

TernaryLLM: Ternarized Large Language Model

TernaryLLM introduces Dual Learnable Ternarization (DLT) to allow both scales and shifts to be learned, addressing asymmetric outliers and non‑zero means in weights. It also proposes Outlier‑Friendly Feature Knowledge Distillation (OFF), which maximizes mutual information between ternarized and floating‑point features using cosine similarity to recover lost information. Experiments show TernaryLLM outperforms prior low‑bit quantization methods on text generation and zero‑shot benchmarks, notably improving LLaMA‑3’s perplexity and accuracy.

By Tianqi Chen, Zhe Li, Weixiang Xu, Zeyu Zhu, Dong Li, Lu Tian, Emad Barsoum, Peisong Wang, Jian Cheng
arXiv AI
Sep 11

Scaling Post-Training Ternarisation to Qwen3-8B Capability Retention, Reproduction, Lossless Packing, and Packed Execution

The paper reports a large‑scale post‑training ternarisation of the Qwen3 language model, extending a conversion pipeline from the 4B to the 8B variant. Using KOTMS rotation, E2M‑ATQ adaptive ternarisation, and GPTQ‑style error compensation, the authors achieve a 1.361× perplexity ratio across three corpora and retain 78.5% of the FP16 accuracy on zero‑shot tasks, with the 8B model outperforming the 4B by 8.9 percentage points. The study also demonstrates lossless lattice‑aware packing, producing an 8.24 GiB checkpoint that preserves perplexity, and shows that direct packed execution can reach 15.52 tokens/s in 7.35 GiB, though packed GEMV remains slower than FP16 cuBLAS.

By Anirudh Malik, M Sparsh Mehra, Poojith Devan
arXiv AI
Sep 3

Post-Training Ternarization of Qwen3-4B Capability, Effective Bit Budget, Storage Compression, and Deployment

The paper reports a post‑training ternarization of the 4‑billion‑parameter Qwen model, achieving an effective 1.641‑bit representation for 81.62 % of its weights while keeping activations at 16‑bit precision. Accuracy drops from 64.5 % to 54.7 % across ten capability tests, with uneven degradation (e.g., BoolQ 84.6 % of teacher performance, ARC‑Challenge 43.8 %). After packing the ternary planes, the model size shrinks from 8.29 GiB to 3.96 GiB with negligible change in perplexity, though inference speed is not improved.

By Anirudh Malik, M Sparsh Mehra, Poojith Devan