arXiv Machine Learning August 28, 2026 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

Activation Outliers Matter: Robust Recovery for Quantized Multimodal LLMs

Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →

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.

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