MUXQ: Mixed-to-Uniform Precision MatriX Quantization via Low-Rank Outlier Decomposition
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arXiv
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| Autori principali: | , , |
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| Natura: | Preprint |
| Pubblicazione: |
2026
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| _version_ | 1866908940008161280 |
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| author | Lee, Seoungsub Kim, In Seo Kim, Seon Wook |
| author_facet | Lee, Seoungsub Kim, In Seo Kim, Seon Wook |
| contents | Large language models (LLMs) have achieved outstanding performance across a wide range of natural language processing tasks, but their enormous parameter counts impose ubstantial memory and computational overheads. This challenge is particularly critical in NPU-based on-device environments, where FP16/FP32 computation is inefficient and integer (INT) quantization is therefore essential. However, existing methods, including ZeroQuant, LLM.int8(), and SmoothQuant, do not fully address input-activation outliers and the associated hardware inefficiencies. To overcome these limitations, we propose MUXQ (Mixed-to-Uniform Quantization). MUXQ detects outlier channels in input activations and introduces a small auxiliary matrix that redistributes outlier magnitudes across channels, thereby alleviating the outlier problem. This enables even activation outliers to be quantized at low-precision INT levels while preserving a hardware-friendly computation structure. Experiments on GPT-2 models at three scales (0.1B, 0.3B, and 0.7B parameters) using the WikiText-2 dataset show that MUXQ consistently achieves lower perplexity than naive quantization. In particular, under per-tensor quantization, MUXQ quantizes both activations and weights to INT8 while maintaining accuracy close to that of FP16. With only modest computational overhead, MUXQ enables stable low-precision inference and can be readily combined with other quantization techniques. These results suggest that MUXQ provides a promising direction for efficient and accurate LLM inference on edge devices. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_04701 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | MUXQ: Mixed-to-Uniform Precision MatriX Quantization via Low-Rank Outlier Decomposition Lee, Seoungsub Kim, In Seo Kim, Seon Wook Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence Large language models (LLMs) have achieved outstanding performance across a wide range of natural language processing tasks, but their enormous parameter counts impose ubstantial memory and computational overheads. This challenge is particularly critical in NPU-based on-device environments, where FP16/FP32 computation is inefficient and integer (INT) quantization is therefore essential. However, existing methods, including ZeroQuant, LLM.int8(), and SmoothQuant, do not fully address input-activation outliers and the associated hardware inefficiencies. To overcome these limitations, we propose MUXQ (Mixed-to-Uniform Quantization). MUXQ detects outlier channels in input activations and introduces a small auxiliary matrix that redistributes outlier magnitudes across channels, thereby alleviating the outlier problem. This enables even activation outliers to be quantized at low-precision INT levels while preserving a hardware-friendly computation structure. Experiments on GPT-2 models at three scales (0.1B, 0.3B, and 0.7B parameters) using the WikiText-2 dataset show that MUXQ consistently achieves lower perplexity than naive quantization. In particular, under per-tensor quantization, MUXQ quantizes both activations and weights to INT8 while maintaining accuracy close to that of FP16. With only modest computational overhead, MUXQ enables stable low-precision inference and can be readily combined with other quantization techniques. These results suggest that MUXQ provides a promising direction for efficient and accurate LLM inference on edge devices. |
| title | MUXQ: Mixed-to-Uniform Precision MatriX Quantization via Low-Rank Outlier Decomposition |
| topic | Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04701 |