# Rethinking Practical and Efficient Quantization Calibration for Vision-Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.07899 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.07899/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 29 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Feb 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Multimodal reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/multimodal-reasoning/)
- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Visual token pruning and efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/visual-token-pruning-and-efficiency/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03326/) (2024)
- [MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Expert AGI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16502/) (2023)
- [GPTQ: Accurate Post-Training Quantization for Generative Pre-trained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.17323/) (2022)
- [Towards VQA Models That Can Read](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08920/) (2019)
- [ChartQA: A Benchmark for Question Answering about Charts with Visual and Logical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10244/) (2022)
- [SmoothQuant: Accurate and Efficient Post-Training Quantization for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10438/) (2022)
- [AWQ: Activation-aware Weight Quantization for LLM Compression and Acceleration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00978/) (2023)
- [Token Merging: Your ViT But Faster](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09461/) (2022)
- [ShareGPT4V: Improving Large Multi-Modal Models with Better Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12793/) (2023)
- [DynamicViT: Efficient Vision Transformers with Dynamic Token Sparsification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02034/) (2021)
- [VizWiz Grand Challenge: Answering Visual Questions from Blind People](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08218/) (2018)
- [Up or Down? Adaptive Rounding for Post-Training Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10568/) (2020)
- [OCRBench: On the Hidden Mystery of OCR in Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07895/) (2023)
- [OmniQuant: Omnidirectionally Calibrated Quantization for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13137/) (2023)
- [SpQR: A Sparse-Quantized Representation for Near-Lossless LLM Weight Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03078/) (2023)
- [AdaViT: Adaptive Tokens for Efficient Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07658/) (2021)
- [Evo-ViT: Slow-Fast Token Evolution for Dynamic Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01390/) (2021)
- [SEED-Bench-2-Plus: Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models with Text-Rich Visual Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16790/) (2024)
- [RPTQ: Reorder-based Post-training Quantization for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01089/) (2023)
- [On the Impact of Calibration Data in Post-training Quantization and Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09755/) (2023)
- [Q-VLM: Post-training Quantization for Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08119/) (2024)
- [MBQ: Modality-Balanced Quantization for Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19509/) (2024)
- [MQuant: Unleashing the Inference Potential of Multimodal Large Language Models via Full Static Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.00425/) (2025)
- [SalQ-VLM: Fine-Grained Saliency-Guided Quantization for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03351/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [MiX: Micro-Inverted-Scaling for End-to-End Low-Bit Vision-Language Model Acceleration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.19683/) (2026)
- [P4Q: Co-designing Token Pruning and Quantization for Vision-Language Model Acceleration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34867/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Post-training quantization (PTQ) is a primary approach for deploying large language models without fine-tuning, and the quantized performance is often strongly affected by the calibration in PTQ. By contrast, in vision-language models (VLMs), substantial differences between visual and text tokens in their activation distributions and sensitivities to quantization error pose significant challenges for effective calibration during PTQ. In this work, we rethink what PTQ calibration should align with in VLMs and propose the Token-level Importance-aware Layer-wise Quantization framework (TLQ). Guided by gradient information, we design a token-level importance integration mechanism for quantization error, and use it to construct a token-level calibration set, enabling a more fine-grained calibration strategy. Furthermore, TLQ introduces a multi-GPU, quantization-exposed layer-wise calibration scheme. This scheme keeps the layer-wise calibration procedure consistent with the true quantized inference path and distributes the complex layer-wise calibration workload across multiple RTX3090 GPUs, thereby reducing reliance on the large memory of A100 GPUs. TLQ is evaluated across two models, three model scales, and two quantization settings, consistently achieving performance improvements across all settings, indicating its strong quantization stability. The code will be released publicly.