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Related papers: Accurate Block Quantization in LLMs with Outliers

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Low-precision training is considered an effective strategy for reducing both training and downstream inference costs. Previous scaling laws for precision mainly focus on integer quantization, which pay less attention to the constituents in…

One of the challenges of quantizing a large language model (LLM) is the presence of outliers. Outliers often make uniform quantization schemes less effective, particularly in extreme cases such as 4-bit quantization. We introduce KurTail, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Mohammad Sadegh Akhondzadeh , Aleksandar Bojchevski , Evangelos Eleftheriou , Martino Dazzi

As large language models (LLMs) grow in parameter size and context length, computation precision has been reduced from 16-bit to 4-bit to improve inference efficiency. However, this reduction causes accuracy degradation due to activation…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Janghwan Lee , Jiwoong Park , Jinseok Kim , Yongjik Kim , Jungju Oh , Jinwook Oh , Jungwook Choi

Quantization of foundational models (FMs) is significantly more challenging than traditional DNNs due to the emergence of large magnitude values called outliers. Existing outlier-aware algorithm-architecture co-design techniques either use…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2025-05-01 Akshat Ramachandran , Souvik Kundu , Tushar Krishna

Post-training quantization (PTQ) has played a key role in compressing large language models (LLMs) with ultra-low costs. However, existing PTQ methods only focus on handling the outliers within one layer or one block, which ignores the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Xin Ding , Xiaoyu Liu , Zhijun Tu , Yun Zhang , Wei Li , Jie Hu , Hanting Chen , Yehui Tang , Zhiwei Xiong , Baoqun Yin , Yunhe Wang

We consider the problem of accurate quantization for language models, where both the weights and activations are uniformly quantized to 4 bits per parameter, the lowest bitwidth format natively supported by GPU hardware. In this context,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-28 Aniruddha Nrusimha , Mayank Mishra , Naigang Wang , Dan Alistarh , Rameswar Panda , Yoon Kim

Although LLM inference has emerged as a critical workload for many downstream applications, efficiently inferring LLMs is challenging due to the substantial memory footprint and bandwidth requirements. In parallel, compute capabilities have…

Recently, significant progress has been made in developing reasoning-capable Large Language Models (LLMs) through long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) techniques. However, this long-CoT reasoning process imposes substantial memory overhead due to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Tengxuan Liu , Shiyao Li , Jiayi Yang , Tianchen Zhao , Feng Zhou , Xiaohui Song , Guohao Dai , Shengen Yan , Huazhong Yang , Yu Wang

Large language models (LLMs) are omnipresent, however their practical deployment is challenging due to their ever increasing computational and memory demands. Quantization is one of the most effective ways to make them more compute and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-04 Yelysei Bondarenko , Riccardo Del Chiaro , Markus Nagel

Large Language Models (LLMs) face significant deployment challenges due to their substantial memory requirements and the computational demands of auto-regressive text generation process. This paper addresses these challenges by focusing on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-21 Yuxuan Yue , Zhihang Yuan , Haojie Duanmu , Sifan Zhou , Jianlong Wu , Liqiang Nie

Current quantization methods for LLMs predominantly rely on block-wise structures to maintain efficiency, often at the cost of representational flexibility. In this work, we demonstrate that element-wise quantization can be made as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Pingzhi Tang , Ruijie Zhou , Fanxu Meng , Wenjie Pei , Muhan Zhang

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across diverse applications. However, their computational overhead during deployment remains a critical bottleneck. While Key-Value (KV) caching effectively…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-26 Insu Han , Zeliang Zhang , Zhiyuan Wang , Yifan Zhu , Susan Liang , Jiani Liu , Haiting Lin , Mingjie Zhao , Chenliang Xu , Kun Wan , Wentian Zhao

Quantization is a critical step to enable efficient LLM serving under limited resource. However, previous research observes that certain weights in the LLM, known as outliers, are significantly sensitive to quantization noises. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Dongwei Wang , Huanrui Yang

Large Language Models (LLMs) training is prohibitively expensive, driving interest in low-precision fully-quantized training (FQT). While novel 4-bit formats like NVFP4 offer substantial efficiency gains, achieving near-lossless training at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Yuxiang Chen , Yifan Liu , Xiaoming Xu , Pengle Zhang , Michael Beyer , Martin Rapp , Jun Zhu , Jianfei Chen

The Key-Value (KV) cache introduces substantial memory overhead during large language model (LLM) inference. Although existing vector quantization (VQ) methods reduce KV cache usage and provide flexible representational capacity across…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Dingyu Yao , Chenxu Yang , Zhengyang Tong , Zheng Lin , Wei Liu , Jian Luan , Weiping Wang

KV-cache memory is a major bottleneck in real-world LLM serving, where systems must simultaneously support latency-sensitive small-batch requests and high-throughput concurrent workloads. Although many KV-cache compression methods improve…

Large language models (LLMs) show great performance in various tasks, but face deployment challenges from limited memory capacity and bandwidth. Low-bit weight quantization can save memory and accelerate inference. Although floating-point…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-06 Yijia Zhang , Sicheng Zhang , Shijie Cao , Dayou Du , Jianyu Wei , Ting Cao , Ningyi Xu

Long-context Large Language Models (LLMs) face significant memory bottlenecks during inference due to the linear growth of key-value (KV) cache with sequence length. While individual optimization techniques like KV cache quantization,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Sai Gokhale , Devleena Das , Rajeev Patwari , Ashish Sirasao , Elliott Delaye

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various natural language processing tasks. However, their size presents significant challenges for deployment and inference. This paper investigates the quantization…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-01 Lucas Maisonnave , Cyril Moineau , Olivier Bichler , Fabrice Rastello

Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) enhances the efficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs) by enabling faster operation and compatibility with more accessible hardware through reduced memory usage, at the cost of small performance drops. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Davide Paglieri , Saurabh Dash , Tim Rocktäschel , Jack Parker-Holder