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Combining Channel-Wise Scaling and Rotation for Quantization-Friendly LLMs (arxiv.org)
2 points by PaulHoule on Jun 25, 2025 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Before squeezing a language model into 4-bit numbers, it shrinks each channel and scrambles values with a fixed mixing transform, taming the few extreme activations that wreck the rounding. This cut the accuracy loss versus full-precision models by about 10–30% with no extra delay.

Abstract · SmoothRot: Combining Channel-Wise Scaling and Rotation for Quantization-Friendly LLMs

We present SmoothRot, a novel post-training quantization technique to enhance the efficiency of 4-bit quantization in Large Language Models (LLMs). SmoothRot addresses the critical challenge of massive activation outliers, by integrating channel-wise scaling with Hadamard transformations. Our technique effectively transforms extreme outliers into quantization-friendly activations, significantly improving quantization accuracy. Experiments conducted on popular LLMs (LLaMA2 7B, LLaMA3.1 8B, and Mistral 7B) demonstrate that SmoothRot consistently reduces the performance gap between quantized and FP16 models by approximately 10-30\% across language generation and zero-shot reasoning tasks, without introducing additional inference latency. Code is available at https://github.com/czakop/smoothrot.

Patrik Czakó, Gábor Kertész, Sándor Szénási
arXiv:2506.05413 · cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG · submitted Jun 4, 2025 · updated Jul 29, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · 6 pages, 3 figures, 5 tables. Accepted to IEEE SMC 2025 conference proceedings

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