arXiv Machine Learning By Anastasiia Prutianova, Alina Bogdanova, Mikhail Shutov, Dmitrii Poimanov, Anatoly Gorkov, Ilia Zharikov

Trainable Vector Quantization for Large Language Models

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The paper introduces Trainable Vector Quantization (TVQ), a method that uses straight-through estimation to allow gradient descent optimization of vector-quantized large language models. TVQ reformulates VQ with trainable latent weights, enabling arbitrary objective minimization and is applied in a block-wise knowledge distillation framework to balance quality and training efficiency. Experiments show TVQ achieves state‑of‑the‑art low‑bit post‑training quantization, achieving near‑lossless 2‑bit quantization for LLaMA2‑70B with only a 1% accuracy drop on question‑answering benchmarks.

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arXiv AI
Aug 26

Compression Trinity: Exploring Sparsity, Quantization, and Low-Rank Approximations for LLM Compression

The paper introduces the "Compression Trinity," a unified framework that jointly applies sparsity, quantization, and low‑rank approximations to compress large language models. It presents several methods—MKOR, SLoPe, OPTIMA, PATCH, and SLiM—that leverage these three pillars to accelerate training, reduce memory bandwidth, and recover accuracy, achieving significant speedups and accuracy gains over existing techniques. The results demonstrate that combining all three compression strategies is essential for efficient, scalable, high‑performance LLM deployment.

By Mohammad Mozaffari
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

Squeeze10-LLM: Squeezing LLMs' Weights by 10 Times via a Staged Mixed-Precision Quantization Method

Squeeze10-LLM is a staged mixed‑precision post‑training quantization framework that reduces 16‑bit LLM weights to an average of 1.6 bits per weight by assigning 80% of weights to 1 bit and 20% to 4 bits. It introduces Post‑Binarization Activation Robustness (PBAR), a weight significance metric that considers activation impact, and Full Information Activation Supervision (FIAS), a strategy that preserves activation information to limit error propagation. Experiments on LLaMA and LLaMA2 demonstrate that Squeeze10‑LLM achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance for sub‑2‑bit weight‑only quantization, raising average accuracy from 43% to 56% on six zero‑shot classification tasks.

By Qingcheng Zhu, Yangyang Ren, Linlin Yang, Yanjing Li, Sheng Xu, Haodong Zhu, Juan Zhang, Runqi Wang, Baochang Zhang