Calibration and Transformation-Free Weight-Only LLMs Quantization via Dynamic Grouping
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Abstract (arXiv)
Large Language Models (LLMs) deliver strong performance but are difficult to deploy under tight memory and compute constraints. Low-bit post-training quantization (PTQ) is a promising direction; however, it typically relies on calibration data, auxiliary transformations, and GPU tools. To address these limitations, we propose MSB (Multi Scale Binary), a calibration-free and transformation-free PTQ method that generalizes binary quantization to multi-bit settings. MSB optimizes a dynamic grouping criterion that minimizes within group variance, yielding group-wise multiscale levels that can be applied consistently across granularities from per tensor to block-wise configurations with 64 elements groups per row, without calibration or intermediate transforms. We implement the optimization in a CPU based solver for the quantization step and evaluate using standard bfloat16 execution without low-bit packing. On Llama 3.2 3B, MSB achieves 8.43 perplexity on WikiText-2 under 4-bit weight only block-wise quantization, compared to 7.81 in full precision and 12.23 with GPTQ its default setup. Overall, MSB provides a new optimization perspective for low-bit PTQ while simplifying the pipeline by removing calibration and transformations.
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References · 16
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- 2025Gemma 3 Technical Reportcited by 1,824
- 2023AWQ: Activation-aware Weight Quantization for LLM Compression and Accelerationcited by 1,298
- 2016XNOR-Net: ImageNet Classification Using Binary Convolutional Neural Networkscited by 849
- 2024SpinQuant: LLM quantization with learned rotationscited by 471
4 more
- 2024BiLLM: Pushing the Limit of Post-Training Quantization for LLMscited by 144
- 2024Pushing the Limits of Large Language Model Quantization via the Linearity Theoremcited by 21
- 2024MobileQuant: Mobile-friendly Quantization for On-device Language Modelscited by 17
- 2024GPTQT: Quantize Large Language Models Twice to Push the Efficiencycited by 4
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- 2026ScaleBITS: Scalable Bitwidth Search for Hardware-Aligned Mixed-Precision LLMs
- 2023Norm Tweaking: High-performance Low-bit Quantization of Large Language Models