提出新方法抑制大模型量化中的异常权重,显著提升低比特精度。
OSAQ: Outlier Self-Absorption for Accurate Low-bit LLM Quantization

- 利用海森矩阵低秩特性识别稳定零空间,构造可吸收的加性权重变换
- 2比特量化下相比原始GPTQ困惑度降低40%以上
- 无需训练或迭代,离线处理无推理开销,适合部署优化
大语言模型虽能力强大,但参数量巨大导致推理资源消耗高。后训练仅权重量化可缓解内存瓶颈,但权重中固有的系统性异常值仍是主要障碍。现有缩放、旋转等方法效果不佳。本文提出异常值自吸收量化(OSAQ),基于二阶低秩性质,在低比特仅权重量化中实施加性权重抑制。观察发现海森矩阵在不同输入下保持低秩一致性,某些方向曲率恒为零,据此识别出稳定的海森零空间,并在线性组合该空间向量基础上构建加性权重变换,有效抑制异常值且不损害任务损失。该变换可离线融入权重,无需层间调整,不引入推理开销。其构造通过闭式解高效实现,无需资源密集型训练或迭代。大量实验表明,OSAQ能有效抑制异常值并提升低比特量化性能。例如,结合GPTQ进行2比特量化时,困惑度较原版GPTQ降低超40%。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities. However, their massive parameter scale leads to significant resource consumption and latency during inference. Post-training weight-only quantization offers a promising solution by reducing model size and accelerating token generation through alleviating the memory-bound issue. Nevertheless, the presence of inherent systematic outliers in weights continues to be a major obstacle. While existing methods, such as scaling and rotation, attempt to address this issue, the performance remains unsatisfactory. In this paper, we propose Outlier Self-Absorption Quantization (OSAQ), which performs additive weight suppression guided by the second-order low-rank property for low-bit weight-only quantization of LLMs. Specifically, we observe that the Hessian exhibits low-rank consistency across different inputs, with certain directions consistently showing vanishing curvature. Leveraging this property, we identify a stable null space of the Hessian and then construct an additive weight transformation by linearly combining the vectors within this null space, thereby suppressing weight outliers without affecting the task loss. This additive transformation can be absorbed into the weights offline, requiring no inter-layer transformations and introducing no inference overhead. Moreover, the construction is efficiently achieved by a closed-form solution, without resource-intensive training or iterative procedures. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OSAQ effectively suppresses outliers and enhances low-bit quantization performance. For instance, in 2-bit quantization, OSAQ, when integrated with GPTQ, achieves over 40% lower perplexity compared to vanilla GPTQ.
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