quantization
QSVD: Efficient Low-rank Approximation for Unified Query-Key-Value Weight Compression in Low-Precision Vision-Language Models
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are integral to tasks such as image captioning and visual question answering, but their high computational cost, driven by large memory footprints and processing time, limits their scalability and real-time applicability. In this work, we propose leveraging Singular-Value Decomposition (SVD) over the joint query (Q), key (K), and value (V) weight matrices to reduce KV cache size and computational overhead. We in addition introduce an efficient rank allocation strategy that dynamically adjusts the SVD rank based on its impact on VLM accuracy, achieving a significant reduction in both memory usage and computational cost. Finally, we extend this approach by applying quantization to both VLM weights and activations, resulting in a highly efficient VLM.
Dimensional Collapse in Evidence and Remedies
Vector-Quantized Variational Autoencoders (VQVAEs) have enabled strong performance in generative modeling by mapping continuous data to learnable codes. In this work, we identify a surprising yet consistent phenomenon that we term dimensional collapse: despite using high-dimensional embeddings, VQVAEs tend to compress their representations into a much smaller subspace, typically only 4 to 10 dimensions. We provide an in-depth analysis of this phenomenon and reveal its relation to model performance and learning dynamics. Interestingly, VQVAEs naturally gravitate toward this low-dimensional regime, and enforcing higher-dimensional usage (e.g., via rank regularization) could lead to degraded performance. To overcome this low-dimensionality limitation, we propose Divide-and-Conquer VQ (DCVQ), which partitions the latent space into multiple low-dimensional subspaces, each quantized independently. By design, each subspace respects the model's preference for low dimensionality, while their combination expands the overall capacity. Our results show that DCVQ overcomes the inherent dimensional bottleneck and achieves improved reconstruction quality across image datasets.
Irrational Complex Rotations Empower Low-bit Optimizers
In this paper, we propose a novel optimizer state compression algorithm, namely ฯ-Quant, which leverages the properties of irrational numbers (e.g., ฯ) for memoryefficient training. The core idea is based on our mathematical findings, which show that a pair of parameters can be represented by a single rotation angle using the complex rotation scheme. Building on this insight, we map the parameters into a complex space and perform quantization using the corresponding rotation angles. To efficiently integrate it into optimization process, we develop an efficient system of geometric equations that computes the precise rotation angles with linear complexity. We evaluate ฯ-Quant on a wide range of tasks. Our experiments show that it can reduce the bit-width of parameters to 3.32-bit, achieving a 41.8% decrease in GPU memory usage, all while maintaining full accuracy.
Improving the Straight-Through Estimator with Zeroth-Order Information
We study the problem of training neural networks with quantized parameters. Learning low-precision quantized parameters by enabling computation of gradients via the Straight-Through Estimator (STE) can be challenging. While the STE enables back-propagation, which is a first-order method, recent works have explored the use of zeroth-order (ZO) gradient descent for fine-tuning. We note that the STE provides high-quality biased gradients, and ZO gradients are unbiased but can be expensive. We thus propose First-Order-Guided Zeroth-Order Gradient Descent (FOGZO) that reduces STE bias while reducing computations relative to ZO methods. Empirically, we show FOGZO improves the tradeoff between quality and training time in Quantization-Aware Pre-Training. Specifically, versus STE at the same number of iterations, we show a 1-8% accuracy improvement for DeiTTiny/Small, 1-2% accuracy improvement on ResNet 18/50, and 1-22 perplexity point improvement for LLaMA models with up to 0.3 billion parameters. For the same loss, FOGZO yields a 796 reduction in computation versus n-SPSA for a 2-layer MLP on MNIST.
Point4bit: Post Training 4-bit Quantization for Point Cloud 3DDetection
Voxel-based 3D object detectors have achieved remarkable performance in point cloud perception, yet their high computational and memory demands pose significant challenges for deployment on resource-constrained edge devices. Posttraining quantization (PTQ) provides a practical means to compress models and accelerate inference; however, existing PTQ methods for point cloud detection are typically limited to INT8 and lack support for lower-bit formats such as INT4, which restricts their deployment potential. In this paper, we present Point4bit, the first general 4-bit PTQ framework tailored for voxel-based 3D object detectors. To tackle challenges in low-bit quantization, we propose two key techniques: (1) Foreground-aware Piecewise Activation Quantization (FA-PAQ), which leverages foreground structural cues to improve the quantization of sparse activations; and (2) Gradient-guided Key Weight Quantization (G-KWQ), which preserves task-critical weights through gradient-based analysis to reduce quantizationinduced degradation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Point4bit achieves INT4 quantization with minimal accuracy loss with less than 1.5% accuracy drop.
Low-Precision Streaming PCA
Low-precision Streaming PCA estimates the top principal component in a streaming setting under limited precision. We establish an information-theoretic lower bound on the quantization resolution required to achieve a target accuracy for the leading eigenvector. We study Oja's algorithm for streaming PCA under linear and nonlinear stochastic quantization. The quantized variants use unbiased stochastic quantization of the weight vector and the updates. Under mild moment and spectral-gap assumptions on the data distribution, we show that a batched version achieves the lower bound up to logarithmic factors under both schemes. This leads to a nearly dimension-free quantization error in the nonlinear quantization setting. Empirical evaluations on synthetic streams validate our theoretical findings and demonstrate that our low-precision methods closely track the performance of standard Oja's algorithm.
One-Bit Clustering for Two Component Sub-Gaussian Mixture Models
Clustering is a fundamental problem in statistics and machine learning. We propose the first one-bit clustering method for two-component sub-Gaussian mixture models. The method uses only one bit per entry of each sample obtained via a dithered quantizer. Under a mild non-spikiness condition on the cluster centers, we show that a variant of Lloyd's algorithm achieves a misclassification rate that decays exponentially with a signal-to-noise ratio comparable to that in the unquantized setting. This result further implies exact recovery under an explicit separation condition, which exceeds the optimal threshold for unquantized data by only a logarithmic factor. When the dimension $p$ is sufficiently large, the non-spikiness condition can be enforced by applying a random rotation using a Haar distributed matrix prior to quantization. In particular, it holds with high probability when $p \gtrsim 1$ for partial recovery and $p \gtrsim \log n \log\log n$ for exact recovery, where $n$ is the sample size. We also establish a minimax lower bound, showing that the misclassification rate and separation condition exhibit sharp constants in general. Numerical results are provided to corroborate the theory and demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method.
Adaptive Fission: Post-training Encoding for Low-latency Spike Neural Networks
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) often rely on rate coding, where high-precision inference depends on long time-steps, leading to significant latency and energy cost--especially for ANN-to-SNN conversions. To address this, we propose Adaptive Fission, a post-training encoding technique that selectively splits highsensitivity neurons into groups with varying scales and weights. This enables neuron-specific, on-demand precision and threshold allocation while introducing minimal spatial overhead. As a generalized form of population coding, it seamlessly applies to a wide range of pretrained SNN architectures without requiring additional training or fine-tuning. Experiments on neuromorphic hardware demonstrate up to 80% reductions in latency and power consumption without degrading accuracy.
HBLLM: Wavelet-Enhanced High-Fidelity 1-Bit Quantization for LLMs
We introduce HBLLM, a wavelet-enhanced high-fidelity 1-bit post-training quantization method for Large Language Models (LLMs). By leveraging Haar wavelet transforms to enhance expressive capacity through frequency decomposition, HBLLM significantly improves quantization fidelity while maintaining minimal overhead.