arXiv AI By Evan Duan

How Quantization Changes Interpretable Features: A Sparse Autoencoder Analysis of Language Models

Read the original on arXiv AI →

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.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv AI.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 18

From Sparse Features to Trustworthy Proxies: Certifying SAE-Based Interpretability

arXiv:2606. 18383v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are increasingly used to extract interpretable features from language models (LMs), yet a central question remains: when can an SAE-based explanation be treated as a faithful view of an underlying frozen LM We study this through a post-hoc generalization framework that certifies the LM via a sparse proxy, obtained by replacing a native hidden activation with its pretrained SAE reconstruction.

By Dibyanayan Bandyopadhyay, Asif Ekbal
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 2

The Structure of Quantization Damage in LLMs: Why the Next Bit Should Be Spent Globally

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