Breaking the 1.58-bit Barrier for Ternary LLMs
Read the original on arXiv AI →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.
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The paper introduces a multi‑shell decoder for Leech‑lattice vector quantization, achieving the best reported 2‑bit quality under its evaluation protocol. It presents a GPU‑friendly layout that fuses dequantization with matrix‑vector multiplication, demonstrating significant speed and memory advantages over traditional one‑hot masks and other 4‑bit methods. Experiments show the new kernel outperforms baseline approaches across multiple model sizes, with measurable gains in throughput and reduced byte traffic.
arXiv:2606. 04050v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Existing quantization methods are fundamentally limited by rigid, integer-based bit-widths (e.
The paper reports the development of 2‑bit microkernels for CPUs and mixed‑precision 2‑bit kernels for Intel Xe2 GPUs, achieving near‑roofline performance. Integrated into LLM inference pipelines, these kernels deliver up to 7× speedup over 16‑bit inference on CPUs and 6.7× on GPUs, surpassing the current state‑of‑the‑art bitnet.cpp runtime by 2.2×. The work demonstrates that ultra‑low‑bit LLM models can be deployed efficiently, offering significant gains in latency, memory, throughput, and energy consumption.
arXiv:2606. 26650v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper, we present CAT-Q, Cost-efficient and Accurate Ternary Quantization, for compressing and accelerating 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:2608. 08081v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large mixture-of-experts (MoE) language models with 26--120 billion parameters exceed the memory capacity of consumer devices through three simultaneous pressures: resident weight matrices, key-value (KV) cache state that grows linearly with context, and dozens of expert sublayers that must be paged on demand.