aiqbench analysis
The paper proposes a half-octave weight grid (base-√2) for post-training quantization that aims to keep LLM inference multiplier-free while recovering much of the accuracy lost by standard power-of-two quantization. The reported gains are measured on Llama-3-8B at 4-bit weights and activations, with a claimed 8.72% relative improvement over the PoT baseline and a 0.4 point gap to uniform integer quantization. Readers should watch whether the hardware savings hold up in real silicon, since the gate-count advantage is so far a processing-element-level estimate.
Fractional Power-of-Two Quantization for Efficient and Effective Multiplier-Free LLM Inference
arXiv:2610.21257v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) demand efficient inference, where the multiply-accumulate (MAC) operations in linear projections dominate compute and energy cost. Post-training quantization (PTQ) reduces this cost by mapping weights and activations to low-bit integers. Power-of-Two (PoT) weight quantization promises efficient multiplier-free LLM inference via shift-add logic, but suffers significant accuracy degradation at low bitwidths due to its coarse base-2 quantization grid. We introduce Fractional PoT (FPoT), a base-$\sqrt{2}$ (half-octave) fractional PoT grid that achieves practical 4-bit weight quantization while preserving a fully integer shift-add datapath. The method combines (i) the base-$\sqrt{2}$ weight grid with uniform integer activations, (ii) a calibration-time grid-alignment refinement absorbed into the static per-channel scale, and (iii) a lightweight 1-adder $\sqrt{2}$ approximation whose error is absorbed during weight calibration via approximate-grid quantization, yielding a processing element (PE) with significantly fewer gates than a 4-bit integer multiplier. On Llama-3-8B with 4-bit weight and activation quantization, FPoT improves zero-shot commonsense reasoning performance by 8.72% relative to the PoT baseline, while maintaining performance close to the uniform integer baseline, with only a negligible 0.4%p degradation. These results hold across various configurations spanning seven models and three bit-widths. Furthermore, FPoT can be integrated with state-of-the-art LLM PTQ methods, demonstrating framework-agnostic applicability.
Abstract:Large Language Models (LLMs) demand efficient inference, where the multiply-accumulate (MAC) operations in linear projections dominate compute and energy cost. Post-training quantization (PTQ) reduces this cost by mapping weights and activations to low-bit integers. Power-of-Two (PoT) weight quantization promises efficient multiplier-free LLM inference via shift-add logic, but suffers significant accuracy degradation at low bitwidths due to its coarse base-2 quantization grid. We introduce Fractional PoT (FPoT), a base-$\sqrt{2}$ (half-octave) fractional PoT grid that achieves practical 4-bit weight quantization while preserving a fully integer shift-add datapath. The method combines (i) the base-$\sqrt{2}$ weight grid with uniform integer activations, (ii) a calibration-time grid-alignment refinement absorbed into the static per-channel scale, and (iii) a lightweight 1-adder $\sqrt{2}$ approximation whose error is absorbed during weight calibration via approximate-grid quantization, yielding a processing element (PE) with significantly fewer gates than a 4-bit integer multiplier. On Llama-3-8B with 4-bit weight and activation quantization, FPoT improves zero-shot commonsense reasoning performance by 8.72% relative to the PoT baseline, while maintaining performance close to the uniform integer baseline, with only a negligible 0.4%p degradation. These results hold across various configurations spanning seven models and three bit-widths. Furthermore, FPoT can be integrated with state-of-the-art LLM PTQ methods, demonstrating framework-agnostic applicability.
37 pages, 19 figures, 22 tables. Accepted at NeurIPS 2026
Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
arXiv:2610.21257 [cs.LG]
(or arXiv:2610.21257v1 [cs.LG] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.21257 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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Full text under the publisher's open licence · 307 words
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