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Exploring the Trade-Offs: Quantization Methods, Task Difficulty, and Model Size in Large Language Models From Edge to Giant

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arxiv 2409.11055 v6 pith:GCKEAN2N submitted 2024-09-17 cs.CL cs.AI

Exploring the Trade-Offs: Quantization Methods, Task Difficulty, and Model Size in Large Language Models From Edge to Giant

classification cs.CL cs.AI
keywords modelsquantizationtasksaccuracyacrosscomprehensivedifficultyevaluation
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Quantization has gained attention as a promising solution for the cost-effective deployment of large and small language models. However, most prior work has been limited to perplexity or basic knowledge tasks and lacks a comprehensive evaluation of recent models like Llama-3.3. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of instruction-tuned models spanning 1B to 405B parameters, applying four quantization methods across 13 datasets. Our findings reveal that (1) quantized models generally surpass smaller FP16 baselines, yet they often struggle with instruction-following and hallucination detection; (2) FP8 consistently emerges as the most robust option across tasks, and AWQ tends to outperform GPTQ in weight-only quantization; (3) smaller models can suffer severe accuracy drops at 4-bit quantization, while 70B-scale models maintain stable performance; (4) notably, \textit{hard} tasks do not always experience the largest accuracy losses, indicating that quantization magnifies a model's inherent weaknesses rather than simply correlating with task difficulty; and (5) an LLM-based judge (MT-Bench) highlights significant performance declines in Coding and STEM tasks, though it occasionally reports improvements in reasoning.

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Cited by 5 Pith papers

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  2. Rethinking Small VLM Quantization: From Component-Wise Analysis to Hardware-Aware Edge Deployment

    cs.LG 2026-07 accept novelty 6.0

    MoE structure, not parameter count, governs INT4 robustness in sub-3B VLMs; SigLIP INT8 latency spikes on Jetson Ampere are a BitsAndBytes-Ampere interaction, and INT4 VRAM savings come with TPOT and energy penalties.

  3. Robust Ultra Low-Bit Post-Training Quantization via Stable Diagonal Curvature Estimate

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    DASH-Q uses a stable diagonal curvature estimate and weighted least squares to achieve robust ultra-low-bit post-training quantization of LLMs, improving zero-shot accuracy by 7% on average over baselines.

  4. Cassandra: Enabling Reasoning LLMs at Edge via Self-Speculative Decoding

    cs.AR 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Cassandra is a self-speculative decoding system that builds a draft model via fine-grained data selection and optimized pruning/mantissa truncation, achieving up to 2.41x speedup over BF16 and 1.81x more tokens than E...

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