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FlatQuant: Flatness Matters for LLM Quantization

23 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

23 Pith papers citing it
abstract

Recently, quantization has been widely used for the compression and acceleration of large language models (LLMs). Due to the outliers in LLMs, it is crucial to flatten weights and activations to minimize quantization error with equally spaced quantization points. Prior research explores various pre-quantization transformations to suppress outliers, such as per-channel scaling and Hadamard transformation. However, we observe that these transformed weights and activations can still exhibit steep and dispersed distributions. In this paper, we propose FlatQuant (Fast and Learnable Affine Transformation), a new post-training quantization approach that enhances the flatness of weights and activations. Our approach identifies optimal affine transformations for each linear layer, calibrated in hours via a lightweight objective. To reduce runtime overhead of affine transformation, we apply Kronecker product with two lightweight matrices, and fuse all operations in FlatQuant into a single kernel. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FlatQuant establishes a new state-of-the-art benchmark for quantization. For example, it achieves less than 1\% accuracy drop for W4A4 quantization on the LLaMA-3-70B model, surpassing SpinQuant by 7.5\%. Additionally, it provides up to 2.3x prefill speedup and 1.7x decoding speedup compared to the FP16 model. Code is available at: https://github.com/ruikangliu/FlatQuant.

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representative citing papers

Theory-optimal Quantization Based on Flatness

cs.LG · 2026-05-11 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

The paper introduces the Flatness metric, derives a theory-optimal quantization solution, and presents BDQ that uses bidirectional diagonal transformations to reduce outlier impact, achieving under 1% drop at W4A4 on LLaMA-3-8B.

QuantClaw: Precision Where It Matters for OpenClaw

cs.AI · 2026-04-24 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

QuantClaw dynamically routes precision in agent workflows to cut cost by up to 21.4% and latency by 15.7% while keeping or improving task performance.

RUQuant: Towards Refining Uniform Quantization for Large Language Models

cs.CL · 2026-04-05 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

RUQuant uses block-wise composite orthogonal matrices from Householder reflections and Givens rotations plus a fine-tuned global reflection to achieve 99.8% full-precision accuracy at W6A6 and 97% at W4A4 for 13B LLMs in about one minute.

MixFP4: Enhancing NVFP4 with Adaptive FP4/INT4 Block Representations

cs.AR · 2026-05-29 · unverdicted · novelty 5.0

MixFP4 extends NVFP4 by adaptively selecting between two FP4 micro-formats per block using repurposed scale sign bits and a unified E2M2 compute path, claiming better accuracy than standard NVFP4 at 3.1% area and 1.5% power overhead.

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Showing 23 of 23 citing papers.