The paper investigates where post‑training quantization (PTQ) harms large language models (LLMs) and how to best allocate a limited precision budget. By causally raising each layer to 8‑bit precision across nine open‑weight models, the authors find that quantization damage is diffuse rather than concentrated in specific task circuits or weight statistics, and that globally refining quantization granularity outperforms selectively protecting the most recoverable layers. They also observe that the residual accuracy loss is budget‑limited and that peak recovery locations correlate with architecture within families but not across families.
By Jundong Hu, Shekar Ramachandran
arXiv:2607. 00908v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mixed-precision quantization (MPQ) has become a key technique for deploying large language models under stringent memory and compute constraints.
By Fei Wang, Chao Xue, Taoran Liu, Li Shen, Ye Liu, ChangXing Ding
arXiv:2608.28911v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The key-value (KV) cache is the dominant memory bottleneck of long-context large language model (LLM) inference, growing linearly with context length....
By Daeha Lee, Do-Hyung Kim, Jae-Hong Kim
arXiv:2606. 03002v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantization is a standard path to deploying large language models, and a quantized model is typically judged acceptable when its perplexity or downstream accuracy stays close to the full-precision original.
By Evan Duan
The paper investigates how activation quantisation affects different computational aspects of language models. While perplexity remains a reliable overall metric, it fails to reveal that induction accuracy stays high while retrieval accuracy drops significantly. Experiments show that the damage depends on more than just error magnitude, and that rotating the basis can recover induction performance even at low bit‑rates.
By Anish Sathyanarayanan
arXiv:2607. 19623v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We characterize per-bit-position fault sensitivity in ML inference across 16 workloads -- spanning transformer-based models and attention-free CNNs -- and across three floating-point formats.
By Muhammad Husnain Mubarik, Karthik Mohan Kumar, Pedro Antonio Pena, Keshavan Varadarajan, Kunal Tyagi