In plain words: A training method teaches a language model to work with low-precision numbers from start to finish, adding no extra steps so it still runs fast on standard chips. With under 0.1% extra training, it beat the best published quantization methods by large margins on modern benchmarks.
Abstract
Large language models can be quantized to reduce inference time latency, model size, and energy consumption, thereby delivering a better user experience at lower cost. A challenge exists to deliver quantized models with minimal loss of accuracy in reasonable time, and in particular to do so without requiring mechanisms incompatible with specialized inference accelerators. Here, we demonstrate a simple, end-to-end quantization-aware training approach that, with an increase in total model training budget of less than 0.1%, outperforms the leading published quantization methods by large margins on several modern benchmarks, with both base and instruct model variants. The approach easily generalizes across different model architectures, can be applied to activations, cache, and weights, and requires the introduction of no additional operations to the model other than the quantization itself.
Steven K. Esser, Jeffrey L. McKinstry, Deepika Bablani, Rathinakumar Appuswamy, Dharmendra S. Modha
arXiv:2507.16933 · cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL · submitted Jul 22, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · 12 pages, 3 figures