In plain words: Adding a normalizing step before every weight layer, then shrinking weights to three values one layer at a time, turns a trained language model into an ultra-compact one. It matched or beat more complicated setups that copy the original model's answers, without extra parts.
Abstract · An Extra RMSNorm is All You Need for Fine Tuning to 1.58 Bits
Large language models (LLMs) have transformed natural-language processing, yet their scale makes real-world deployment costly. Post-training quantization reduces memory and computation but often degrades accuracy, while quantization-aware training can recover performance at the cost of extra training. Pushing quantization to the ternary (2-bit) regime yields even larger savings but is notoriously unstable. Building on recent work showing that a bias-free, RMS-normalized Transformer with straight-through estimation can reach 1.58-bit precision, we demonstrate that simply inserting RMS normalization before every linear projection and applying a gradual, layer-wise quantization schedule stably fine-tunes full-precision checkpoints into ternary LLMs. Our approach matches or surpasses more elaborate knowledge-distillation pipelines on standard language-modeling benchmarks without adding model complexity. These results indicate that careful normalization alone can close much of the accuracy gap between ternary and full-precision LLMs, making ultra-low-bit inference practical.
Cody Steinmetz, Gavin Childress, Aaron Herbst, Gavin Jones, Jasdeep Singh, Eli Vang, Keagan Weinstock
arXiv:2505.08823 · cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL · submitted May 12, 2025
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