arXiv AI By Haoqian Meng, Yilun Luo, Yafei Zhao, Wenyuan Liu, Huaqing Zheng, Xindian Ma, Peng Zhang

SharQ: Bridging Activation Sparsity and FP4 Quantization for LLM Inference

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arXiv:2606. 26587v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Low-bit floating-point formats and semi-structured sparsity are increasingly supported by modern accelerators, yet combining them for LLM activation compression remains challenging: activations contain input-dependent outliers that dominate block scales in FP4 quantization, and directly applying N:M sparsity masks discards moderate values, coupling sparsification loss with quantization error.

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