arXiv:2510.18784cs.LG2025-10中稿 · MLSys 2026被引 4

通过曲率感知梯度修正,显著提升低比特量化训练精度。

CAGE: Curvature-Aware Gradient Estimation For Accurate Quantization-Aware Training

  • 用曲率信息修正传统梯度估计,更精准反映量化损失。
  • 3比特权值与激活量化的精度媲美4比特,压缩损失减半。
  • 兼容主流优化器,适配大模型量化训练场景。

尽管低比特量化感知训练(QAT)已有诸多研究,但仍存在与原生训练的精度差距。为此,我们提出CAGE(曲率感知梯度估计),在直通估计器(STE)基础上引入基于局部曲率的梯度修正项,以缓解量化带来的损失上升。从多目标优化视角出发,该方法在平滑非凸条件下具备强收敛性保障。理论上,我们定义了量化优化中的帕累托最优解;实践中,该方法不依赖特定优化器,但可高效利用Adam统计量。在实现上,对于微调任务,其压缩精度损失相比此前最优方法减少一半;在Llama模型预训练中,3比特权值与激活(W3A3)的精度达到此前4比特(W4A4)的水平。官方代码见https://github.com/IST-DASLab/CAGE。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Despite significant work on low-bit quantization-aware training (QAT), there is still an accuracy gap between such techniques and native training. To address this, we introduce CAGE (Curvature-Aware Gradient Estimation), a new QAT method that augments the straight-through estimator (STE) gradient with a curvature-aware correction designed to counteract the loss increase induced by quantization. CAGE is derived from a multi-objective view of QAT that balances loss minimization with the quantization constraints, yielding a principled correction term that depends on local curvature information. On the theoretical side, we introduce the notion of Pareto-optimal solutions for quantized optimization, and establish that CAGE yields strong convergence guarantees in the smooth non-convex setting. In terms of implementation, our approach is optimizer-agnostic, but we provide a highly-efficient implementation that leverages Adam statistics. CAGE significantly improves upon the prior state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy, for similar computational cost: for QAT fine-tuning, it halves the compression accuracy loss relative to the prior best method, while for QAT pre-training of Llama models, its accuracy for 3-bit weights-and-activations (W3A3) matches the accuracy achieved at 4-bits (W4A4) with the prior best method. The official implementation can be found over https://github.com/IST-DASLab/CAGE .

量化训练梯度修正大模型压缩

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