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Is (Selective) Round-to-Nearest Quantization All You Need? (arxiv.org)
2 points by PaulHoule on Jun 10, 2025 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Shrinking a big language model by simply rounding each number to the nearest value it can store, while keeping a few sensitive layers more precise, is a cheap way to make it smaller. It generated text faster and matched the accuracy of fancier compression tricks.

Abstract · Is (Selective) Round-To-Nearest Quantization All You Need?

Quantization became a necessary tool for serving ever-increasing Large Language Models (LLMs). RTN (Round-to-Nearest) is perhaps the simplest quantization technique that has been around well before LLMs surged to the forefront of machine learning (ML) research. Yet, it has been largely dismissed by recent and more advanced quantization methods that claim superiority over RTN in nearly every aspect of performance. This work aims to dispel this established point of view, showing that RTN is not only much cheaper to apply, but also its token generation throughput can be better than and accuracy can be similar to more advanced alternatives. In particular, we discuss our implementation of RTN based on the recent Marlin kernels and demonstrate how the accuracy of RTN can be gradually improved by selectively increasing the data precision format of certain model layers and modules. Based on our results, we argue that RTN presents a viable and practical choice for quantizing LLMs.

Alex Kogan
arXiv:2505.15909 · cs.LG · submitted May 21, 2025
abstract · pdf · html

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