The paper introduces Fractional Power-of-Two (FPoT) quantization, a base‑√2 weight grid that enables 4‑bit weight quantization for large language models while keeping a fully integer shift‑add datapath. FPoT combines a fractional PoT grid with uniform integer activations, a calibration‑time grid‑alignment refinement, and a lightweight 1‑adder √2 approximation to reduce gate count compared to a 4‑bit multiplier. On Llama‑3‑8B, FPoT boosts zero‑shot commonsense reasoning by 8.72% over the standard PoT baseline and stays within 0.4% of uniform integer performance, with benefits extending across seven models and three bit‑widths.
By Sunghyun Wee, Geunjae Choi, Hyeonjin Kim, Suyoung Kim, Nojun Kwak
arXiv:2608. 15602v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While binary quantization theoretically promises extreme compression and acceleration for Large Language Models (LLMs), existing research often overlooks the necessity of specialized hardware kernels, thus failing to unleash the full acceleration potential due to persistent reliance on expensive floating-point arithmetic or runtime dequantization overheads.
By Qingyao Yang, Runming Yang, He Xiao, Wendong Xu, Junyu Chen, Haobo Liu, Chenchen Ding, Ruihan Hu, Yik-Chung Wu, Ngai Wong
The paper "LLM Inference in a Flash!" proposes an integer‑only quantization scheme and a dictionary‑based KV cache compression technique to enable large language model inference on compute‑in‑flash (CIF) devices. By eliminating floating‑point operations and reducing KV cache traffic through sparse dictionary coding, the authors achieve minimal accuracy loss while cutting dynamic KV cache traffic by 15× on Llama‑3.1‑8B and Qwen‑2.5‑7B models.
By Sebastian Zhao, Minseo Kim, Coleman Hooper, Luca Manolache, Michael W. Mahoney, Yakun Sophia Shao, Kurt Keutzer, Amir Gholami
arXiv:2605. 06485v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have transformed artificial intelligence, but their computational requirements remain prohibitive for most users.
By Nii Osae Osae Dade, Tony Morri, Moinul Hossain Rahat, Sayandip Pal, Rickston Pinto
arXiv:2608. 06763v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Weight quantization for large-language-model inference must balance adaptive reconstruction levels with representations regular enough for efficient GPU execution.
By Xuetian Gao
arXiv:2602. 01027v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Mixed-precision quantization is a promising approach for compressing large language models under tight memory budgets.
By Xin Nie, Haicheng Zhang, Liang Dong, Beining Feng, Jinhong Weng, Guiling Sun