Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing, albeit at the cost of immense memory and computation requirements. Post-training quantization (PTQ) is becoming the de facto method to reduce the memory footprint and improve the inference throughput of LLMs. In this work, we aim to push the upper limit of LLM PTQ by optimizing the weight rounding parameters with the block reconstruction technique, a predominant method in previous vision models. We propose TesseraQ, a new state-of-the-art PTQ technique, to quantize the weights of LLMs to ultra-low bits. To effectively optimize the rounding in LLMs and stabilize the reconstruction process, we introduce progressive adaptive rounding. This approach iteratively transits the soft rounding variables to hard variables during the reconstruction process. Additionally, we optimize the dequantization scale parameters to fully leverage the block reconstruction technique. We demonstrate that TesseraQ can be seamlessly integrated with existing scaling or clipping-based PTQ algorithms such as AWQ and OmniQuant, significantly enhancing their performance and establishing a new state-of-the-art. For instance, when compared to AWQ, TesseraQ improves the wikitext2 perplexity from 14.65 to 6.82 and average downstream accuracy from 50.52 to 59.27 with 2-bit weight-only quantization of LLaMA-2-7B. Across a range of quantization schemes, including W2A16, W3A16, W3A3, and W4A4, TesseraQ consistently exhibits superior performance.

Test-time interventions for language models can enhance factual accuracy, mitigate harmful outputs, and improve model efficiency without costly retraining. But despite a flood of new methods, different types of interventions are largely developing independently. In practice, multiple interventions must be applied sequentially to the same model, yet we lack standardized ways to study how interventions interact. We fill this gap by introducing composable interventions, a framework to study the effects of using multiple interventions on the same language models, featuring new metrics and a unified codebase. Using our framework, we conduct extensive experiments and compose popular methods from three emerging intervention categories -- Knowledge Editing, Model Compression, and Machine Unlearning. Our results from 310 different compositions uncover meaningful interactions: compression hinders editing and unlearning, composing interventions hinges on their order of application, and popular general-purpose metrics are inadequate for assessing composability. Taken together, our findings showcase clear gaps in composability, suggesting a need for new multi-objective interventions. All of our code is public: https://github.com/hartvigsen-group/composable-interventions.

Emergent Large Language Models (LLMs) use their extraordinary performance and powerful deduction capacity to discern from traditional language models. However, the expenses of computational resources and storage for these LLMs are stunning, quantization then arises as a trending conversation. To address accuracy decay caused by quantization, two streams of works in post-training quantization methods stand out. One uses other weights to compensate existing quantization error, while the other transfers the quantization difficulty to other parts in the model. Combining both merits, we introduce Learnable Singular value Increment (LSI) as an advanced solution. LSI uses Singular Value Decomposition to extract singular values of the weights and make them learnable to help weights compensate each other conditioned on activation. Incorporating LSI with existing techniques, we achieve state-of-the-art performance in diverse quantization settings, no matter in weight-only, weight-activation or extremely low bit scenarios. By unleashing the potential of LSI, efficient finetuning on quantized model is no longer a prohibitive problem.

The significant resource requirements associated with Large-scale Language Models (LLMs) have generated considerable interest in the development of techniques aimed at compressing and accelerating neural networks. Among these techniques, Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) has emerged as a subject of considerable interest due to its noteworthy compression efficiency and cost-effectiveness in the context of training. Existing PTQ methods for LLMs limit the optimization scope to scaling transformations between pre- and post-quantization weights. In this paper, we advocate for the direct optimization using equivalent Affine transformations in PTQ (AffineQuant). This approach extends the optimization scope and thus significantly minimizing quantization errors. Additionally, by employing the corresponding inverse matrix, we can ensure equivalence between the pre- and post-quantization outputs of PTQ, thereby maintaining its efficiency and generalization capabilities. To ensure the invertibility of the transformation during optimization, we further introduce a gradual mask optimization method. This method initially focuses on optimizing the diagonal elements and gradually extends to the other elements. Such an approach aligns with the Levy-Desplanques theorem, theoretically ensuring invertibility of the transformation. As a result, significant performance improvements are evident across different LLMs on diverse datasets. To illustrate, we attain a C4 perplexity of 15.76 (2.26 lower vs 18.02 in OmniQuant) on the LLaMA2-7B model of W4A4 quantization without overhead. On zero-shot tasks, AffineQuant achieves an average of 58.61 accuracy (1.98 lower vs 56.63 in OmniQuant) when using 4/4-bit quantization for LLaMA-30B, which setting a new state-of-the-art benchmark for PTQ in LLMs.

Generative Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable results for a wide range of tasks. However, deploying these models for inference has been a significant challenge due to their unprecedented resource requirements. This has forced existing deployment frameworks to use multi-GPU inference pipelines, which are often complex and costly, or to use smaller and less performant models. In this work, we demonstrate that the main bottleneck for generative inference with LLMs is memory bandwidth, rather than compute, specifically for single batch inference. While quantization has emerged as a promising solution by representing model weights with reduced precision, previous efforts have often resulted in notable performance degradation. To address this, we introduce SqueezeLLM, a post-training quantization framework that not only enables lossless compression to ultra-low precisions of up to 3-bit, but also achieves higher quantization performance under the same memory constraint. Our framework incorporates two novel ideas: (i) sensitivity-based non-uniform quantization, which searches for the optimal bit precision assignment based on second-order information; and (ii) the Dense-and-Sparse decomposition that stores outliers and sensitive weight values in an efficient sparse format. When applied to the LLaMA models, our 3-bit quantization significantly reduces the perplexity gap from the FP16 baseline by up to 2.1x as compared to the state-of-the-art methods with the same memory requirement. Furthermore, when deployed on an A6000 GPU, our quantized models achieve up to 2.3x speedup compared to the baseline. Our code is open-sourced and available online.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown excellent performance on various tasks, but the astronomical model size raises the hardware barrier for serving (memory size) and slows down token generation (memory bandwidth). In this paper, we propose Activation-aware Weight Quantization (AWQ), a hardware-friendly approach for LLM low-bit weight-only quantization. Our method is based on the observation that weights are not equally important: protecting only 1% of salient weights can greatly reduce quantization error. We then propose to search for the optimal per-channel scaling that protects the salient weights by observing the activation, not weights. AWQ does not rely on any backpropagation or reconstruction, so it can well preserve LLMs' generalization ability on different domains and modalities, without overfitting to the calibration set. AWQ outperforms existing work on various language modeling and domain-specific benchmarks. Thanks to better generalization, it achieves excellent quantization performance for instruction-tuned LMs and, for the first time, multi-modal LMs. Alongside AWQ, we implement an efficient and flexible inference framework tailored for LLMs on the edge, offering more than 3x speedup over the Huggingface FP16 implementation on both desktop and mobile GPUs. It also democratizes the deployment of the 70B Llama-2 model on mobile GPU (NVIDIA Jetson Orin 64GB).