arXiv:2606.15652cs.LGcs.CL2026-06

4-bit量化让大模型更快更省内存,但精度损失大,新方法解决此问题。

MosaicQuant: Inlier-Outlier Disaggregation for Unified 4-Bit LLM Quantization

论文配图:MosaicQuant: Inlier-Outlier Disaggregation for Unified 4-Bit LLM Quantization
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 将权重分为密集基础部分和稀疏残差部分,分别用4比特表示
  • 在LLaMA3和Qwen3上接近全精度性能,速度提升1.24倍
  • 适合追求低比特推理速度与精度平衡的研究者和工程师

4比特量化显著降低大语言模型的内存占用并加速推理,但其有限的位宽难以同时准确表示密集的常见值(内点)和稀疏的大值(外点),导致显著精度下降。现有混合精度方法通过保留外点的高精度来缓解,但破坏了低位宽执行的统一性,引入精度转换和额外数据移动,削弱实际加速效果。我们提出MosaicQuant,一种基于内点-外点解耦原则的统一4比特量化范式。不提高外点精度,而是将完整权重矩阵量化为一个密集4比特基组件,其中内点被忠实保留,外点则被不可避免地量化;随后引入一个稀疏4比特残差组件,专门补偿输出失真集中的关键权重块。然而,统一表示仍不足,因直接以独立核执行稀疏残差会破坏统一低位宽推理流程。为此,我们提出ZipperEngine,通过重叠流水线将稀疏块计算融合进密集4比特GEMM核中,不仅统一表示,也统一执行,形成单一连贯的低位宽推理管道。在LLaMA3和Qwen3上的大量实验表明,MosaicQuant在保持接近FP16精度的同时,相较于W16A16基线最高实现1.24倍加速。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

4-bit quantization significantly reduces the memory footprint and accelerates the inference of large language models (LLMs). However, its limited bit-width representation struggles to faithfully capture both dense common values (\emph{inliers}) and rare large-magnitude values (\emph{outliers}), causing substantial accuracy degradation. Existing mixed-precision methods mitigate this by retaining outliers in high precision, but at the cost of breaking the uniformity of low-bit execution, introducing precision conversion and extra data movement that undermine practical speedup. We propose \textbf{MosaicQuant}, a unified 4-bit LLM quantization paradigm built on a novel principle of \emph{inlier--outlier disaggregation}. Rather than elevating outlier precision, MosaicQuant quantizes the full weight matrix into a dense 4-bit base component, where inliers are captured faithfully while outlier are inevitably quantized. A sparse 4-bit residual component is then introduced to compensate for these quantization errors, selectively targeting the most error-critical weight blocks where output distortion is shown to be concentrated. However, a unified representation alone is insufficient, as naïvely executing the sparse residual as a separate kernel still breaks the unified low-bit inference pipeline. To bridge this gap, we introduce \textbf{ZipperEngine}, which fuses sparse block computation into the dense 4-bit GEMM kernel via an overlapped pipeline, unifying not only the representation but also the execution into a single coherent low-bit inference pipeline. Extensive experiments on LLaMA3 and Qwen3 demonstrate that MosaicQuant preserves near-FP16 accuracy while achieving up to $1.24\times$ speedup over the W16A16 baseline.

量化大模型推理加速4比特

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