用矩阵分解找关键权重,无需数据就能高效压缩大模型。
Intrinsic Structure as a Proxy for Saliency: SVD-Based Weight Preservation for Mixed-Precision Quantization in Large Language Models
- 通过SVD提取权重主成分,识别重要参数
- 在高保护预算下准确率超AWQ和SpQR,达66.06%
- 无须校准数据,适合隐私敏感场景
随着大语言模型参数量持续增长,在通用硬件上部署愈发困难。后训练量化(PTQ)通过将权重精度降至4比特或更低来缓解此问题。然而,均匀量化常因少数‘异常特征’权重——虽数量少但对模型精度至关重要——导致性能显著下降。当前主流方法如AWQ和SpQR依赖校准数据,通过激活幅度或海森灵敏度识别关键权重,但在数据隐私要求高或无校准数据时无法使用。本文提出一种无需数据的结构感知假设:通过奇异值分解(SVD)识别的主成分权重在模型下游任务中具有内在重要性。我们引入新选择启发式,保留与主成分对齐的前k个权重(保持FP32),其余权重激进量化。在DistilBERT基础上,于GLUE基准(MRPC、RTE、QNLI)对比激活感知(AWQ)与二阶方法(SpQR)。实验表明,结构重要性与功能重要性高度相关。在挑战性的RTE任务中,我们的SVD方法达到66.06%准确率,优于AWQ与SpQR的65.34%,验证了内在矩阵结构可作为权重显著性的可靠代理,且无需前向传播或校准数据。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to scale in parameter count, deploying them on commodity hardware has become increasingly challenging. Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) addresses this by reducing the precision of model weights, typically to 4-bit or lower. However, uniform quantization often leads to significant performance degradation due to the presence of ``outlier features'' -- weights that, while few in number, are critical for maintaining model accuracy. Current state-of-the-art methods such as AWQ (Activation-aware Weight Quantization) and SpQR (Sparse Quantization Representations) rely on calibration data to identify these salient weights via activation magnitudes or Hessian sensitivity. In scenarios where data privacy is paramount or calibration data is unavailable, these methods are inapplicable. In this work, we propose a data-free, structure-aware hypothesis: that the weights identified as Principal Components via Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) are intrinsically important to the model's downstream performance. We introduce a novel selection heuristic that preserves the top-$k$ weights aligned with the principal components in FP32, while aggressively quantizing the residual weights. We compare our method against activation-aware (AWQ) and second-order (SpQR) methods across GLUE benchmarks (MRPC, RTE, QNLI) using a DistilBERT backbone. Our experiments reveal that structural importance is highly correlated with functional importance. On the challenging RTE task, our SVD-based method achieves an accuracy of 66.06\%, outperforming both AWQ (65.34\%) and SpQR (65.34\%) at high protection budgets, validating that intrinsic matrix structure can serve as a robust proxy for weight saliency without the need for forward passes or calibration data.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。