In plain words: Shrinking a model's weights to fewer bits so it runs on less memory can make its short-term memory worse. When many old values had overwritten each other, the 4-bit versions dropped from 81% to 68.3% accuracy, and 8-bit versions also slipped slightly.
Abstract · Compress and Forget: bitsandbytes Quantization Amplifies Proactive Interference in LLMs
Proactive interference (PI) is a documented failure mode in large language models in which retrieval of a repeatedly overwritten value degrades as prior overwrites accumulate, mirroring a classical phenomenon in human working memory. Post-training quantization (PTQ) is now the default deployment path for open-weight models, yet its effect on this failure mode has not been tested. We evaluate three precision levels (FP16, INT8, INT4/NF4, via bitsandbytes) across three architecturally distinct instruction-tuned models (Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3, Phi-3.5-mini-instruct), holding the retrieval task fixed. INT4 quantization significantly reduces accuracy under high interference in every model (e.g., from 81.0% to 68.3% for Qwen), confirmed by paired McNemar's tests ($p \le 2.6 \times 10^{-6}$) and a mixed-effects regression spanning all interference levels; INT8, often assumed safe, also carries a smaller but real penalty in two of three models. The effect is specific to semantically similar (word-type) distractors and reverses sign under a numeric control condition, and is mechanistically linked to a rise in same-key intrusion errors under INT4 (from 21.5% to 24.6% of trials, $p = 4.8 \times 10^{-7}$). A follow-up ablation shows the effect originates in the quantized transformer backbone rather than the output projection layer. These results suggest that bitsandbytes 4-bit quantization can impose an additional cost on applications relying on long, updatable, semantically dense contexts, even when aggregate benchmark accuracy appears largely unaffected. We release our code and tokenizer-verified vocabulary construction method at https://github.com/ShayanShahrabi/compress-and-forget
Shayan Shahrabi-Farahani, Dara Rahmati
arXiv:2608.18578 · cs.CL, cs.LG · submitted Aug 19, 2026 · updated Aug 20, 2026
abstract · pdf · html · 21 pages, 6 figures, 11 tables. Author list formatting simplified. Code and data released at https://github.com/ShayanShahrabi/compress-and-forget