English

Late Breaking Results: Quamba-SE: Soft-edge Quantizer for Activations in State Space Models

Machine Learning 2026-01-15 v1 Artificial Intelligence Hardware Architecture

Abstract

We propose Quamba-SE, a soft-edge quantizer for State Space Model (SSM) activation quantization. Unlike existing methods, using standard INT8 operation, Quamba-SE employs three adaptive scales: high-precision for small values, standard scale for normal values, and low-precision for outliers. This preserves outlier information instead of hard clipping, while maintaining precision for other values. We evaluate on Mamba- 130M across 6 zero-shot benchmarks. Results show that Quamba- SE consistently outperforms Quamba, achieving up to +2.68% on individual benchmarks and up to +0.83% improvement in the average accuracy of 6 datasets.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.09451,
  title  = {Late Breaking Results: Quamba-SE: Soft-edge Quantizer for Activations in State Space Models},
  author = {Yizhi Chen and Ahmed Hemani},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.09451},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Accepted to DATE Late Breaking Results 2026, Verona, Italy

R2 v1 2026-07-01T09:04:16.756Z