# When Quantization Affects Confidence of Large Language Models?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.00632 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.00632/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [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)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [Think you have Solved Question Answering? Try ARC, the AI2 Reasoning Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05457/) (2018)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [HellaSwag: Can a Machine Really Finish Your Sentence?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07830/) (2019)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [PIQA: Reasoning about Physical Commonsense in Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11641/) (2019)
- [BoolQ: Exploring the Surprising Difficulty of Natural Yes/No Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10044/) (2019)
- [Can a Suit of Armor Conduct Electricity? A New Dataset for Open Book Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02789/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Quantization and Training of Neural Networks for Efficient Integer-Arithmetic-Only Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05877/) (2017)
- [Measuring Calibration in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01685/) (2019)
- [How Can We Know When Language Models Know? On the Calibration of Language Models for Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00955/) (2020)
- [Calibration of Pre-trained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07892/) (2020)
- [Uncertainty Quantification with Pre-trained Language Models: A Large-Scale Empirical Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04714/) (2022)
- [Language Models are Few-shot Multilingual Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07684/) (2021)
- [Compression of Generative Pre-trained Language Models via Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10705/) (2022)
- [Compression of Deep Learning Models for Text: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05221/) (2020)
- [Do Emergent Abilities Exist in Quantized Large Language Models: An Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08072/) (2023)
- [Exploring Predictive Uncertainty and Calibration in NLP: A Study on the Impact of Method & Data Scarcity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15452/) (2022)
- [On the Calibration of Massively Multilingual Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12265/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Rational Tuning of LLM Cascades via Probabilistic Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09345/) (2025)
- [Investigating Social Bias Changes in Quantized Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06181/) (2026)
- [Quantisation Reshapes the Metacognitive Geometry of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08976/) (2026)
- [Quality Is Not a Safety Proxy Under Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.10154/) (2026)
- [Which Decisions Low-Bit Quantization Breaks, and How to Predict Them](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.06564/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent studies introduced effective compression techniques for Large Language Models (LLMs) via post-training quantization or low-bit weight representation. Although quantized weights offer storage efficiency and allow for faster inference, existing works have indicated that quantization might compromise performance and exacerbate biases in LLMs. This study investigates the confidence and calibration of quantized models, considering factors such as language model type and scale as contributors to quantization loss. Firstly, we reveal that quantization with GPTQ to 4-bit results in a decrease in confidence regarding true labels, with varying impacts observed among different language models. Secondly, we observe fluctuations in the impact on confidence across different scales. Finally, we propose an explanation for quantization loss based on confidence levels, indicating that quantization disproportionately affects samples where the full model exhibited low confidence levels in the first place.