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ZeroQuant: Efficient and Affordable Post-Training Quantization for Large-Scale Transformers

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arxiv 2206.01861 v1 pith:3OCNODIJ submitted 2022-06-04 cs.CL cs.LG

ZeroQuant: Efficient and Affordable Post-Training Quantization for Large-Scale Transformers

classification cs.CL cs.LG
keywords quantizationzeroquantmodelsint8activationsaffordablefp16model
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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How to efficiently serve ever-larger trained natural language models in practice has become exceptionally challenging even for powerful cloud servers due to their prohibitive memory/computation requirements. In this work, we present an efficient and affordable post-training quantization approach to compress large Transformer-based models, termed as ZeroQuant. ZeroQuant is an end-to-end quantization and inference pipeline with three main components: (1) a fine-grained hardware-friendly quantization scheme for both weight and activations; (2) a novel affordable layer-by-layer knowledge distillation algorithm (LKD) even without the access to the original training data; (3) a highly-optimized quantization system backend support to remove the quantization/dequantization overhead. As such, we are able to show that: (1) ZeroQuant can reduce the precision for weights and activations to INT8 in a cost-free way for both BERT and GPT3-style models with minimal accuracy impact, which leads to up to 5.19x/4.16x speedup on those models compared to FP16 inference; (2) ZeroQuant plus LKD affordably quantize the weights in the fully-connected module to INT4 along with INT8 weights in the attention module and INT8 activations, resulting in 3x memory footprint reduction compared to the FP16 model; (3) ZeroQuant can be directly applied to two of the largest open-sourced language models, including GPT-J6B and GPT-NeoX20, for which our INT8 model achieves similar accuracy as the FP16 model but achieves up to 5.2x better efficiency.

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Forward citations

Cited by 10 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

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    cs.LG 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 8.0

    KV cache quantization silently erodes LLM safety alignment via vulnerable low-dimensional subspaces, diagnosed by Per-Channel Reduction into three failure modes and mitigated training-free with up to 97% recovery.

  2. QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs

    cs.LG 2023-05 conditional novelty 7.0

    QLoRA finetunes 4-bit quantized LLMs via LoRA adapters to match full-precision performance while using far less memory, enabling 65B-scale training on single GPUs and producing Guanaco models near ChatGPT level.

  3. Accelerating Large Language Model Decoding with Speculative Sampling

    cs.CL 2023-02 accept novelty 7.0

    Speculative sampling accelerates LLM decoding 2-2.5x by letting a draft model propose short sequences that the target model scores in parallel, then applies modified rejection sampling to keep the exact target distribution.

  4. GPTQ: Accurate Post-Training Quantization for Generative Pre-trained Transformers

    cs.LG 2022-10 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    GPTQ quantizes 175B-parameter GPT models to 3-4 bits per weight in one shot using approximate second-order information, achieving negligible accuracy degradation and 3-4x inference speedups.

  5. LLM.int8(): 8-bit Matrix Multiplication for Transformers at Scale

    cs.LG 2022-08 conditional novelty 7.0

    LLM.int8() performs 8-bit inference for transformers up to 175B parameters with no accuracy loss by combining vector-wise quantization for most features with 16-bit mixed-precision handling of systematic outlier dimensions.

  6. Motion-Compensated Weight Compression

    cs.CV 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    MCWC aligns permutation-symmetric blocks across layers to enable sequential prediction and residual entropy coding, improving rate-accuracy tradeoffs versus quantization and prior codecs on language and vision models.

  7. Diagnostic-Driven Layer-Wise Compensation for Post-Training Quantization of Encoder-Decoder ASR Models

    cs.SD 2026-01 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    FADE adaptively compensates for quantization errors layer-by-layer in ASR models using diagnostic scores from weight geometry and calibration data, yielding lower word error rates at 3- and 4-bit precision.

  8. H$_2$O: Heavy-Hitter Oracle for Efficient Generative Inference of Large Language Models

    cs.LG 2023-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    H2O evicts non-heavy-hitter tokens from the KV cache using a dynamic submodular policy, retaining recent and frequent-co-occurrence tokens to reduce memory while preserving accuracy.

  9. AWQ: Activation-aware Weight Quantization for LLM Compression and Acceleration

    cs.CL 2023-06 conditional novelty 6.0

    AWQ quantizes LLM weights to low bits by scaling salient channels based on activation statistics, outperforming prior methods on language, coding, math, and multi-modal benchmarks.

  10. A KL Lens on Quantization: Fast, Forward-Only Sensitivity for Mixed-Precision SSM-Transformer Models

    cs.LG 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    KL divergence provides a superior forward-only metric for identifying quantization-sensitive parts in SSM-Transformer hybrids, outperforming MSE and SQNR and supporting practical mixed-precision deployment on edge devices.