# SAGE: Pushing 2-Bit Vector-Quantized LLMs toward Real-World Usability

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14745 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.14745/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 52 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 52)

- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [Measuring Mathematical Problem Solving With the MATH Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03874/) (2021)
- [HellaSwag: Can a Machine Really Finish Your Sentence?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07830/) (2019)
- [Let's Verify Step by Step](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.20050/) (2023)
- [Is Your Code Generated by ChatGPT Really Correct? Rigorous Evaluation of Large Language Models for Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01210/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Instruction-Following Evaluation for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07911/) (2023)
- [DeepSeek-V4: Towards Highly Efficient Million-Token Context Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19348/) (2026)
- [Enhancing Chat Language Models by Scaling High-quality Instructional Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14233/) (2023)
- [QuaRot: Outlier-Free 4-Bit Inference in Rotated LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00456/) (2024)
- [GLM-5: from Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15763/) (2026)
- [SpinQuant: LLM quantization with learned rotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16406/) (2024)
- [OmniQuant: Omnidirectionally Calibrated Quantization for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13137/) (2023)
- [QuIP: 2-Bit Quantization of Large Language Models With Guarantees](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13304/) (2023)
- [QuIP#: Even Better LLM Quantization with Hadamard Incoherence and Lattice Codebooks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04396/) (2024)
- [LLM-QAT: Data-Free Quantization Aware Training for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17888/) (2023)
- [SqueezeLLM: Dense-and-Sparse Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07629/) (2023)
- [DeepMath-103K: A Large-Scale, Challenging, Decontaminated, and Verifiable Mathematical Dataset for Advancing Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11456/) (2025)
- [Extreme Compression of Large Language Models via Additive Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06118/) (2024)
- [PowerInfer: Fast Large Language Model Serving with a Consumer-grade GPU](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12456/) (2023)
- [Are We Done with MMLU?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04127/) (2024)
- [Kimi K3: Open Frontier Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.24653/) (2026)
- [FlatQuant: Flatness Matters for LLM Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09426/) (2024)
- [EfficientQAT: Efficient Quantization-Aware Training for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11062/) (2024)
- [OstQuant: Refining Large Language Model Quantization with Orthogonal and Scaling Transformations for Better Distribution Fitting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13987/) (2025)
- [QTIP: Quantization with Trellises and Incoherence Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11235/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Extreme low-bit weight-only quantization is an effective approach to reducing the deployment costs of large language models. Below 3 bits, scalar quantization often suffers severe accuracy loss, while vector quantization (VQ) better preserves accuracy through more expressive joint encoding. However, existing VQ methods still exhibit substantial degradation on real-world tasks, and two design challenges remain underexplored: (1) protecting sensitive weight channels within jointly encoded vectors; and (2) allocating a fixed bit budget among representation components, such as direction and radius, to suit different weight matrices. To address these challenges, we propose SAGE: Split Adaptation and Grouping by Energy for weight-only vector quantization. First, Energy-Stratified Grouping (ESG) couples channel grouping with activation-weighted fitting, grouping channels from different energy tiers within each subvector to prioritize sensitive channels. Second, Adaptive Bit Split (ABS) balances direction-codebook capacity and radius precision per matrix, selecting the split with the lowest activation-weighted reconstruction error under a fixed budget. Across benchmarks covering knowledge, mathematics, code generation, instruction following, and tool use, SAGE achieves state-of-the-art performance in the 2-bit quantization setting. On Qwen3-30B-A3B, it retains 95.3% of the BF16 model's average benchmark score. With our custom-designed CUDA kernel, SAGE delivers up to a 2.55-fold non-streaming end-to-end speedup over FP16. The code is available at https://github.com/Zincwolf/sage.