English

Efficient VQ-QAT and Mixed Vector/Linear quantized Neural Networks

Machine Learning 2026-04-28 v1 Hardware Architecture

Abstract

In this work, we developed and tested 3 techniques for vector quantization (VQ) based model weight compression. To mitigate codebook collapse and enable end-to-end training, we adopted cosine similarity-based assignment. Building on ideas from attention-based formulations in Differentiable K-Means (DKM), we further improved this approach by using cosine similarity for assignment combined with top-1 sampling and a straight-through estimator, thereby eliminating the need for weighted-average reconstruction. Finally, we investigated the use of differentiable neural architecture search (NAS) to adaptively select layer-wise quantization configurations, further optimizing the compression process. Although our method does not consistently outperform existing approaches across all quantization levels, it provides useful insights into the design trade-offs and behaviors of VQ-based model compression methods.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.23172,
  title  = {Efficient VQ-QAT and Mixed Vector/Linear quantized Neural Networks},
  author = {Terry Gou and Puneet Gupta},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.23172},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T12:34:52.439Z