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| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.22988 |
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| _version_ | 1866912607187763200 |
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| author | Tseng, Albert Sun, Zhaofeng De Sa, Christopher |
| author_facet | Tseng, Albert Sun, Zhaofeng De Sa, Christopher |
| contents | The goal of quantization is to produce a compressed model whose output distribution is as close to the original model's as possible. To do this tractably, most quantization algorithms minimize the immediate activation error of each layer as a proxy for the end-to-end error. However, this ignores the effect of future layers, making it a poor proxy. In this work, we introduce Yet Another Quantization Algorithm (YAQA), an adaptive rounding algorithm that directly considers the error at the network's output. YAQA introduces a series of theoretical results that culminate in the first end-to-end error bounds for quantization algorithms. First, we characterize the convergence time of adaptive rounding algorithms via the structure of their Hessian approximations. We then show that the end-to-end error can be bounded by the approximation's cosine similarity to the true Hessian. This admits a natural Kronecker-factored approximation with corresponding near-optimal Hessian sketches. YAQA is provably better than GPTQ/LDLQ and empirically reduces the error by $\approx 30\%$ over these methods. YAQA even achieves a lower error than quantization aware training. This translates to state of the art performance on downstream tasks, all while adding no inference overhead. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_22988 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Model-Preserving Adaptive Rounding Tseng, Albert Sun, Zhaofeng De Sa, Christopher Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence The goal of quantization is to produce a compressed model whose output distribution is as close to the original model's as possible. To do this tractably, most quantization algorithms minimize the immediate activation error of each layer as a proxy for the end-to-end error. However, this ignores the effect of future layers, making it a poor proxy. In this work, we introduce Yet Another Quantization Algorithm (YAQA), an adaptive rounding algorithm that directly considers the error at the network's output. YAQA introduces a series of theoretical results that culminate in the first end-to-end error bounds for quantization algorithms. First, we characterize the convergence time of adaptive rounding algorithms via the structure of their Hessian approximations. We then show that the end-to-end error can be bounded by the approximation's cosine similarity to the true Hessian. This admits a natural Kronecker-factored approximation with corresponding near-optimal Hessian sketches. YAQA is provably better than GPTQ/LDLQ and empirically reduces the error by $\approx 30\%$ over these methods. YAQA even achieves a lower error than quantization aware training. This translates to state of the art performance on downstream tasks, all while adding no inference overhead. |
| title | Model-Preserving Adaptive Rounding |
| topic | Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.22988 |