# Sherry: Hardware-Efficient 1.25-Bit Ternary Quantization via Fine-grained Sparsification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07892 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.07892/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [Think you have Solved Question Answering? Try ARC, the AI2 Reasoning Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05457/) (2018)
- [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)
- [QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14314/) (2023)
- [PIQA: Reasoning about Physical Commonsense in Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11641/) (2019)
- [GPTQ: Accurate Post-Training Quantization for Generative Pre-trained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.17323/) (2022)
- [Fine-tuning Aligned Language Models Compromises Safety, Even When Users Do Not Intend To!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03693/) (2023)
- [LLM.int8(): 8-bit Matrix Multiplication for Transformers at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.07339/) (2022)
- [QuaRot: Outlier-Free 4-Bit Inference in Rotated LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00456/) (2024)
- [Learned Step Size Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.08153/) (2019)
- [Quantized Neural Networks: Training Neural Networks with Low Precision Weights and Activations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.07061/) (2016)
- [8-bit Optimizers via Block-wise Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02861/) (2021)
- [Trained Ternary Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01064/) (2016)
- [Ternary Weight Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.04711/) (2016)
- [Outlier Suppression: Pushing the Limit of Low-bit Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13325/) (2022)
- [Learning N:M Fine-grained Structured Sparse Neural Networks From Scratch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04010/) (2021)
- [Extremely Low Bit Neural Network: Squeeze the Last Bit Out with ADMM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.09870/) (2017)
- [Dynamic Sparse No Training: Training-Free Fine-tuning for Sparse LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08915/) (2023)
- [T-MAC: CPU Renaissance via Table Lookup for Low-Bit LLM Deployment on Edge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00088/) (2024)
- [BitNet b1.58 2B4T Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12285/) (2025)
- [Ultra-FineWeb: Efficient Data Filtering and Verification for High-Quality LLM Training Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05427/) (2025)
- [Quantization Meets dLLMs: A Systematic Study of Post-training Quantization for Diffusion LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14896/) (2025)
- [Bitnet.cpp: Efficient Edge Inference for Ternary LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11880/) (2025)
- [FedMef: Towards Memory-efficient Federated Dynamic Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14737/) (2024)
- [RoLoRA: Fine-tuning Rotated Outlier-free LLMs for Effective Weight-Activation Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08044/) (2024)
- [1-bit AI Infra: Part 1.1, Fast and Lossless BitNet b1.58 Inference on CPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16144/) (2024)
- [LRQ-DiT: Log-Rotation Post-Training Quantization of Diffusion Transformers for Image and Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03485/) (2025)
- [Distributed Pruning Towards Tiny Neural Networks in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01977/) (2022)

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

- [Hy-MT2: A Family of Fast, Efficient and Powerful Multilingual Translation Models in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.22064/) (2026)
- [DuQuant++: Fine-grained Rotation Enhances Microscaling FP4 Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17789/) (2026)
- [AngelSlim: A more accessible, comprehensive, and efficient toolkit for large model compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.21233/) (2026)
- [Breaking the 1.58-bit Barrier for Ternary LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.16338/) (2026)
- [Llama-Mobile: Efficient 2.7-Bit Quantization of VLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.21134/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) on resource-constrained edge devices is increasingly hindered by prohibitive memory and computational requirements. While ternary quantization offers a compelling solution by reducing weights to {-1, 0, +1}, current implementations suffer from a fundamental misalignment with commodity hardware. Most existing methods must choose between 2-bit aligned packing, which incurs significant bit wastage, or 1.67-bit irregular packing, which degrades inference speed. To resolve this tension, we propose Sherry, a hardware-efficient ternary quantization framework. Sherry introduces a 3:4 fine-grained sparsity that achieves a regularized 1.25-bit width by packing blocks of four weights into five bits, restoring power-of-two alignment. Furthermore, we identify weight trapping issue in sparse ternary training, which leads to representational collapse. To address this, Sherry introduces Arenas, an annealing residual synapse mechanism that maintains representational diversity during training. Empirical evaluations on LLaMA-3.2 across five benchmarks demonstrate that Sherry matches state-of-the-art ternary performance while significantly reducing model size. Notably, on an Intel i7-14700HX CPU, our 1B model achieves zero accuracy loss compared to SOTA baselines while providing 25% bit savings and 10% speed up. The code is available at https://github.com/Tencent/AngelSlim .