# ZeroQuant(4+2): Redefining LLMs Quantization with a New FP6-Centric Strategy for Diverse Generative Tasks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.08583 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08583/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 56 of its 72 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 56)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14314/) (2023)
- [Pointer Sentinel Mixture Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.07843/) (2016)
- [BoolQ: Exploring the Surprising Difficulty of Natural Yes/No Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10044/) (2019)
- [BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05100/) (2022)
- [GPTQ: Accurate Post-Training Quantization for Generative Pre-trained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.17323/) (2022)
- [SmoothQuant: Accurate and Efficient Post-Training Quantization for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10438/) (2022)
- [Don't Give Me the Details, Just the Summary! Topic-Aware Convolutional Neural Networks for Extreme Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08745/) (2018)
- [AWQ: Activation-aware Weight Quantization for LLM Compression and Acceleration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00978/) (2023)
- [Teaching Machines to Read and Comprehend](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03340/) (2015)
- [A Survey of Quantization Methods for Efficient Neural Network Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13630/) (2021)
- [Learned Step Size Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.08153/) (2019)
- [Up or Down? Adaptive Rounding for Post-Training Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10568/) (2020)
- [ZeroQuant: Efficient and Affordable Post-Training Quantization for Large-Scale Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01861/) (2022)
- [Quantizing deep convolutional networks for efficient inference: A whitepaper](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.08342/) (2018)
- [Quantized Neural Networks: Training Neural Networks with Low Precision Weights and Activations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.07061/) (2016)
- [Sheared LLaMA: Accelerating Language Model Pre-training via Structured Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06694/) (2023)
- [QuIP: 2-Bit Quantization of Large Language Models With Guarantees](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13304/) (2023)
- [HAWQ: Hessian AWare Quantization of Neural Networks with Mixed-Precision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03696/) (2019)
- [Q-BERT: Hessian Based Ultra Low Precision Quantization of BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05840/) (2019)
- [Optimal Brain Compression: A Framework for Accurate Post-Training Quantization and Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.11580/) (2022)
- [Q8BERT: Quantized 8Bit BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06188/) (2019)
- [SqueezeLLM: Dense-and-Sparse Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07629/) (2023)
- [Post-Training Quantization for Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14156/) (2021)
- [ZeroQ: A Novel Zero Shot Quantization Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.00281/) (2020)
- [I-BERT: Integer-only BERT Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01321/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [MicroScopiQ: Accelerating Foundational Models through Outlier-Aware Microscaling Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05282/) (2024)
- [BitMoD: Bit-serial Mixture-of-Datatype LLM Acceleration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11745/) (2024)
- [MixLLM: LLM Quantization with Global Mixed-precision between Output-features and Highly-efficient System Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14590/) (2024)
- [FP6-LLM: Efficiently Serving Large Language Models Through FP6-Centric Algorithm-System Co-Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14112/) (2024)
- [Kitty: Accurate and Efficient 2-bit KV Cache Quantization with Dynamic Channel-wise Precision Boost](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18643/) (2025)
- [Preserving LLM Capabilities through Calibration Data Curation: From Analysis to Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10618/) (2025)
- [QEFT: Quantization for Efficient Fine-Tuning of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08661/) (2024)
- [Scalify: scale propagation for efficient low-precision LLM training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17353/) (2024)
- [LOOKAT: Lookup-Optimized Key-Attention for Memory-Efficient Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10155/) (2026)
- [ROSAQ: Rotation-based Saliency-Aware Weight Quantization for Efficiently Compressing Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13472/) (2025)
- [FlexQ: Efficient Post-training INT6 Quantization for LLM Serving via Algorithm-System Co-Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04405/) (2025)
- [Is (Selective) Round-To-Nearest Quantization All You Need?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15909/) (2025)
- [Q&C: When Quantization Meets Cache in Efficient Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02508/) (2025)
- [AMS-QUANT: Adaptive Mantissa Sharing for Floating-point Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16045/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This study examines 4-bit quantization methods like GPTQ in large language models (LLMs), highlighting GPTQ's overfitting and limited enhancement in Zero-Shot tasks. While prior works merely focusing on zero-shot measurement, we extend task scope to more generative categories such as code generation and abstractive summarization, in which we found that INT4 quantization can significantly underperform. However, simply shifting to higher precision formats like FP6 has been particularly challenging, thus overlooked, due to poor performance caused by the lack of sophisticated integration and system acceleration strategies on current AI hardware. Our results show that FP6, even with a coarse-grain quantization scheme, performs robustly across various algorithms and tasks, demonstrating its superiority in accuracy and versatility. Notably, with the FP6 quantization, codestar-15B model performs comparably to its FP16 counterpart in code generation, and for smaller models like the 406M it closely matches their baselines in summarization. Neither can be achieved by INT4. To better accommodate various AI hardware and achieve the best system performance, we propose a novel 4+2 design for FP6 to achieve similar latency to the state-of-the-art INT4 fine-grain quantization. With our design, FP6 can become a promising solution to the current 4-bit quantization methods used in LLMs.