Pith. sign in

hub

OstQuant: Refining Large Language Model Quantization with Orthogonal and Scaling Transformations for Better Distribution Fitting

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

13 Pith papers citing it
abstract

Post-training quantization (PTQ) has emerged as a widely adopted technique for compressing and accelerating Large Language Models (LLMs). The major challenge in LLM quantization is that uneven and heavy-tailed data distributions can expand the quantization range, thereby reducing bit precision for most values. Recent methods attempt to eliminate outliers and balance inter-channel differences by employing linear transformations; however, they remain heuristic and are often overlook optimizing the data distribution across the entire quantization space.In this paper, we introduce Quantization Space Utilization Rate (QSUR), a novel metric that effectively assesses the quantizability of transformed data by measuring the space utilization of the data in the quantization space. We complement QSUR with mathematical derivations that examine the effects and limitations of various transformations, guiding our development of Orthogonal and Scaling Transformation-based Quantization (OSTQuant). OSQuant employs a learnable equivalent transformation, consisting of an orthogonal transformation and a scaling transformation, to optimize the distributions of weights and activations across the entire quantization space. Futhermore, we propose the KL-Top loss function, designed to mitigate noise during optimization while retaining richer semantic information within the limited calibration data imposed by PTQ. OSTQuant outperforms existing work on various LLMs and benchmarks. In the W4-only setting, it retains 99.5\% of the floating-point accuracy. In the more challenging W4A4KV4 configuration, OSTQuant reduces the performance gap by 32\% on the LLaMA-3-8B model compared to state-of-the-art methods. \href{https://github.com/BrotherHappy/OSTQuant}{https://github.com/BrotherHappy/OSTQuant}.

hub tools

years

2026 11 2025 2

representative citing papers

LoopQ: Quantization for Recursive Transformers

cs.LG · 2026-05-08 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

LoopQ provides a loop-aware PTQ framework for recursive Transformers that mitigates distribution shift, state reuse, and recursive error accumulation, yielding 68.8% higher average accuracy and 87.7% lower perplexity under W4A4 versus static baselines.

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.

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.

citing papers explorer

Showing 13 of 13 citing papers.