NestQuant: Nested Lattice Quantization for Matrix Products and LLMs

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Savkin, Semyon, Porat, Eitan, Ordentlich, Or, Polyanskiy, Yury
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Savkin, Semyon
Porat, Eitan
Ordentlich, Or
Polyanskiy, Yury
author_facet Savkin, Semyon
Porat, Eitan
Ordentlich, Or
Polyanskiy, Yury
contents Post-training quantization (PTQ) has emerged as a critical technique for efficient deployment of large language models (LLMs). This work proposes NestQuant, a novel PTQ scheme for weights and activations that is based on self-similar nested lattices. Recent works have mathematically shown such quantizers to be information-theoretically optimal for low-precision matrix multiplication. We implement a practical low-complexity version of NestQuant based on Gosset lattice, making it a drop-in quantizer for any matrix multiplication step (e.g., in self-attention, MLP etc). For example, NestQuant quantizes weights, KV-cache, and activations of Llama-3-8B to 4 bits, achieving perplexity of 6.6 on wikitext2. This represents more than 55% reduction in perplexity gap with respect to unquantized model (perplexity of 6.14) compared to state-of-the-art Metas SpinQuant (perplexity 7.3), OstQuant (7.3) and QuaRot (8.2). Comparisons on bigger models (up to 70B) and on various LLM evaluation benchmarks confirm uniform superiority of NestQuant.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_09720
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle NestQuant: Nested Lattice Quantization for Matrix Products and LLMs
Savkin, Semyon
Porat, Eitan
Ordentlich, Or
Polyanskiy, Yury
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Information Theory
Post-training quantization (PTQ) has emerged as a critical technique for efficient deployment of large language models (LLMs). This work proposes NestQuant, a novel PTQ scheme for weights and activations that is based on self-similar nested lattices. Recent works have mathematically shown such quantizers to be information-theoretically optimal for low-precision matrix multiplication. We implement a practical low-complexity version of NestQuant based on Gosset lattice, making it a drop-in quantizer for any matrix multiplication step (e.g., in self-attention, MLP etc). For example, NestQuant quantizes weights, KV-cache, and activations of Llama-3-8B to 4 bits, achieving perplexity of 6.6 on wikitext2. This represents more than 55% reduction in perplexity gap with respect to unquantized model (perplexity of 6.14) compared to state-of-the-art Metas SpinQuant (perplexity 7.3), OstQuant (7.3) and QuaRot (8.2). Comparisons on bigger models (up to 70B) and on various LLM evaluation benchmarks confirm uniform superiority of NestQuant.
title NestQuant: Nested Lattice Quantization for Matrix Products and LLMs
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Information Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.09720