TurboQuant on Quantized Models: Solving Compound Quantization Error with Pre-RoPE Compression and KV Compaction

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Auteur principal: Gökyıldız, Onur
Format: Recurso digital
Langue:anglais
Publié: Zenodo 2026
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author Gökyıldız, Onur
author_facet Gökyıldız, Onur
contents <p>Every TurboQuant implementation we tested produces catastrophic output on GGUF quantized models. The reason is compound quantization error: weight quantization noise gets amplified through a second round of KV cache quantization, and softmax makes it worse. On Qwen 2.5 7B Q4_K_M, a representative Python implementation produces perplexity of 3,556 (baseline: 5.18). That is not a typo.</p> <p>This paper presents tq-kv, a Rust implementation of TurboQuant (ICLR 2026) that actually works on quantized models. We solve compound error through the 3-Fix Framework (sink token preservation, past-only quantizatioKV cache compressionn, cache state management) and introduce Pre-RoPE key quantization, which compresses keys before rotary position embedding to exploit position-independent channel statistics. Pre-RoPE reduces the perplexity gap by 34-59% at identical compression ratio. We also integrate KV Compaction, an attention-matching token reduction method orthogonal to bit compression, achieving combined compression up to 100-400x.</p> <p>On the systems side, we replace the dense QJL projection from the original paper with a structured Hadamard variant (SRHT-QJL) that is 115x faster and produces +4.5 dB better SNR. Fused attention scoring eliminates key decompression via AVX2+FMA centroid lookup, yielding 6-8.9x speedup. An O(1) incremental cache architecture cuts per-token overhead from 608 ms to 0.65 ms.</p> <p>We evaluate across five architectures (Llama-3, Qwen2.5, Gemma, Mistral, Phi-3) on both FP16 and GGUF Q4_K_M models. At 4-bit, tq-kv achieves +3.7% PPL delta with Pre-RoPE on GGUF (vs +17% for standard TQ and 3,556 for existing implementations), 9/9 needle-in-a-haystack pass rate, and 7.5-14.2x key compression. The system is 13.7K lines of Rust, ships as a crate on crates.io, and includes a complete inference engine with OpenAI-compatible API.</p>
format Recurso digital
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institution Zenodo
language eng
publishDate 2026
publisher Zenodo
record_format zenodo
spellingShingle TurboQuant on Quantized Models: Solving Compound Quantization Error with Pre-RoPE Compression and KV Compaction
Gökyıldız, Onur
KV cache compression
compound quantization error
Pre-RoPE quantization
KV compaction
TurboQuant
Rust
GGUF
Lloyd-Max codebook
Walsh-Hadamard transform
SIMD
<p>Every TurboQuant implementation we tested produces catastrophic output on GGUF quantized models. The reason is compound quantization error: weight quantization noise gets amplified through a second round of KV cache quantization, and softmax makes it worse. On Qwen 2.5 7B Q4_K_M, a representative Python implementation produces perplexity of 3,556 (baseline: 5.18). That is not a typo.</p> <p>This paper presents tq-kv, a Rust implementation of TurboQuant (ICLR 2026) that actually works on quantized models. We solve compound error through the 3-Fix Framework (sink token preservation, past-only quantizatioKV cache compressionn, cache state management) and introduce Pre-RoPE key quantization, which compresses keys before rotary position embedding to exploit position-independent channel statistics. Pre-RoPE reduces the perplexity gap by 34-59% at identical compression ratio. We also integrate KV Compaction, an attention-matching token reduction method orthogonal to bit compression, achieving combined compression up to 100-400x.</p> <p>On the systems side, we replace the dense QJL projection from the original paper with a structured Hadamard variant (SRHT-QJL) that is 115x faster and produces +4.5 dB better SNR. Fused attention scoring eliminates key decompression via AVX2+FMA centroid lookup, yielding 6-8.9x speedup. An O(1) incremental cache architecture cuts per-token overhead from 608 ms to 0.65 ms.</p> <p>We evaluate across five architectures (Llama-3, Qwen2.5, Gemma, Mistral, Phi-3) on both FP16 and GGUF Q4_K_M models. At 4-bit, tq-kv achieves +3.7% PPL delta with Pre-RoPE on GGUF (vs +17% for standard TQ and 3,556 for existing implementations), 9/9 needle-in-a-haystack pass rate, and 7.5-14.2x key compression. The system is 13.7K lines of Rust, ships as a crate on crates.io, and includes a complete inference engine with OpenAI-compatible API.</p>
title TurboQuant on Quantized Models: Solving Compound Quantization Error with Pre-RoPE Compression and KV Compaction
topic KV cache compression
compound quantization error
Pre-RoPE quantization
KV compaction
TurboQuant
Rust
GGUF
Lloyd-Max codebook
Walsh-Hadamard transform
SIMD
url https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19375408