Q-MINO: A Minimal-Norm Method for Quantization-Aware Training

Abstract:The Straight-Through Estimator (STE) is a widely used heuristic for Quantization-Aware Training (QAT), but its surrogate gradients can exhibit substantial mismatch with the underlying quantized objective, leading to noisy updates and parameter oscillations, particularly in ultra-low-bit regimes. We propose the Quantization-Aware Minimal-Norm Optimizer (Q-MINO), a temporal bundle method that combines gradient consensus, state-drift regularization, and an alignment constraint to construct stabilized, minimum-norm update directions from recent optimization states. Q-MINO solves the resulting constrained subproblem using a warm-started Frank--Wolfe procedure with a feasible fallback initialization. Theoretically, via a stochastic Lyapunov Kurdyka--Łojasiewicz (KL) framework, we show that Q-MINO achieves asymptotic neighborhood convergence. Moreover, we detail numerical experiments with Q-MINO at various quantizations.

Optimization and Control (math.OC); Hardware Architecture (cs.AR); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2610.00738 [math.OC]

(or arXiv:2610.00738v1 [math.OC] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.00738 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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