The paper introduces a label‑free mixed‑precision post‑training quantization technique for text embedders called Quantize by Drift. It uses quantization‑induced representation drift—measured by re‑encoding a corpus after quantizing a module—to estimate module sensitivity without relevance labels. Across five development embedders, drift‑based ordering of mixed‑precision plans correlates strongly with held‑out retrieval quality (macro Spearman 0.911) and outperforms uniform precision under a hard byte budget, though it does not fully replace fine‑grained redistribution strategies.
By Hyojung Han, Jongmin Kim, Seung-Hun Jeon
arXiv:2608.20873v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Every way of teaching a deployed language model something new -- full fine-tuning, adapter merging, model editing -- replaces the released checkpoint,...
By Zifeng Liu, Zhiyong Du, Yaxin Lu, Yiming Mao, Zhenhe Wang, Wenqi Shi, Zhengkun Jing
arXiv:2609.06473v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Inference-time activation steering enables behavioral control of large language models without parameter modification, while post-training quantization...
By Saurav Bhandari, Benjamin Wade
arXiv:2608.03854v4 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Quantized large language models can run on consumer hardware, which motivates interest in on-premises processing of sensitive data. The reliability...
By Anton Rasmussen, Hong Qin
The paper presents a system for the MedReason 2026 challenge that tackles both multiple‑choice and open‑ended medical visual question answering using offline, containerized inference. Key findings include that comparing answer semantics rather than labels boosts retrieval‑only accuracy from 20.0 % to 57.5 % on a 200‑case holdout, and that varying the number of in‑prompt retrieved examples has minimal impact on final accuracy (93.5 %–94.0 %). The final system achieves 94.0 % MCQ accuracy on the development set and 93.20 % on the official pre‑evaluation, far surpassing the off‑the‑shelf baseline.
"whyItMatters":"The results demonstrate that semantic‑aware retrieval and careful adapter tuning can dramatically improve medical VQA performance, offering a practical approach for high‑accuracy, offline inference in clinical settings."
By Tristan Kirscher (ICube, Institut Strauss), Niklas C. Koser (CAU), Soren Pirk (CAU)
arXiv:2609. 16391v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Weight-only post-training quantization is the cheapest way to shrink a retrieval embedder, and the received advice for applying it -- protect the embedding table, allocate bits by module sensitivity, prefer a ranking-aware objective over weight reconstruction -- was carried into LLM quantization largely intact.
By Hyojung Han