Theory-optimal Quantization Based on Flatness
A new paper introduces a novel quantization framework called Bidirectional Diagonal Quantization (BDQ) aimed at improving the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs). The authors address the issue of activation outliers that degrade model performance, particularly at lower bit precision. Their extensive experiments demonstrate that BDQ sets a new benchmark in quantization with minimal accuracy loss compared to existing methods.
- ▪Post-training quantization is crucial for compressing and accelerating LLM inference.
- ▪The new metric Flatness is introduced to quantify outlier distributions in quantization.
- ▪BDQ achieves less than 1% accuracy drop in W4A4 quantization on the LLaMA-3-8B model.
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Computer Science > Machine Learning arXiv:2605.18800 (cs) [Submitted on 11 May 2026] Title:Theory-optimal Quantization Based on Flatness Authors:Xiusheng Huang, Zhe Li, Xuanwu Yin, Lu Wang, Yequan Wang, Dong Li, Emad Barsoum, Kang Liu View a PDF of the paper titled Theory-optimal Quantization Based on Flatness, by Xiusheng Huang and 6 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Post-training quantization has emerged as a widely adopted technique for compressing and accelerating the inference of Large Language Models (LLMs). The primary challenges in LLMs quantization stem from activation outliers, which significantly degrade model performance especially at lower bit precision.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at arXiv cs.AI.
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