arXiv:2605.26175cs.LGcs.AI2026-05

通过重塑激活分布,让低比特量化更准确

InfoQuant: Shaping Activation Distributions for Low-Bit LLM Quantization

论文配图:InfoQuant: Shaping Activation Distributions for Low-Bit LLM Quantization
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 从信息论出发设计更适合量化的激活分布
  • W4A4KV4下平均保留97%浮点精度
  • 无需训练,适合部署时快速优化模型

低比特激活量化仍是大语言模型高效部署的主要瓶颈。问题不仅在于激活值存在异常值,更在于其分布常与低比特均匀量化器不匹配。现有后训练量化(PTQ)方法虽会抑制峰值、平衡通道或最小化重建误差,但很少说明何种激活分布真正易于离散化。结果是激活数值看似平滑,却因量化范围过宽或多数值坍缩至均值附近几级而产生巨大量化误差。本文将激活变换视为面向量化器的分布设计,并从信息论角度分析量化误差。分析表明,量化友好的激活应同时具备更小的数值范围和在该范围内的充分分散性。基于此,我们提出InfoQuant,一种无需训练的方法,采用峰值抑制正交变换(PSOT)将激活重塑为更易量化的分布,并引入自适应异常值令牌选择提升优化鲁棒性。在多个LLM系列中,InfoQuant持续优于先前的PTQ及端到端训练基线。在W4A4KV4设置下,平均保留97%浮点精度,使LLaMA-2 13B的性能差距缩小42%。代码已开源。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Low-bit activation quantization remains a major bottleneck in efficient large language model (LLM) deployment. The difficulty is not only that activations contain outliers, but that their distributions are often poorly matched to a low-bit uniform quantizer. Existing post-training quantization (PTQ) methods suppress peaks, balance channels, or minimize reconstruction error, yet they rarely specify what activation distribution is actually easy to discretize. As a result, activations may appear numerically smoother while still incurring large quantization error because the quantization range remains wide or most values collapse into a few levels near the mean. We recast activation transformation as quantizer-facing distribution design and analyze quantization error from an information-theoretic perspective. Our analysis shows that quantization-friendly activations should jointly have a smaller numerical range and sufficient dispersion within that range. Guided by this analysis, we propose InfoQuant, a train-free method that employs Peak Suppression Orthogonal Transformation (PSOT) to shape activations into more quantization-friendly distributions. We further introduce adaptive outlier-token selection to improve the robustness of PSOT during optimization. Across multiple LLM families, InfoQuant consistently outperforms prior PTQ and end-to-end training baselines. Under W4A4KV4, it preserves 97% of floating-point accuracy on average and reduces the LLaMA-2 13B performance gap by 42% over the previous state of the art. Code is available at [https://github.com/LLIKKE/InfoQuant](https://github.com/LLIKKE/InfoQuant)

量化LLM激活分布PTQ

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