arXiv AI By I Kennedy, T Kennedy

Quantization Error Is Spectrally Flat: A Single Random Probe Is a Calibrated, Data-Free Sensitivity Estimator, with Application to Budget-Targeted Mixed-Precision Quantization

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From Attention Sensitivity to Layer Role: Revisiting Mixed-Precision Quantization of Transformers

The paper investigates post‑training quantization of transformer attention blocks by optimizing a joint loss over the Q, K, V projections rather than individual weight matrices. Using this joint attention‑based objective (JAB), the authors achieve significant compression on Mistral‑7B, recovering 77‑90% of the performance gap at 3 bits, but the method fails when MLP layers are included. A role‑aware offset rule that ignores sensitivity estimates outperforms JAB on GPT‑2 and full Mistral‑7B, demonstrating that the matrix a weight belongs to is more critical than sensitivity metrics.