Saying, Not Knowing: Aggressively GGUF-Quantized Small Language Models Still Write Rare Words They Can No Longer Define
Post-training quantization to the GGUF format's mixed-precision K-quants is commonly how open-weight language models reach consumer hardware, yet its effect on fine-grained lexical competence is uncharacterized. We audit 27 quantized artifacts across 13 families and four architecture backbones, 0.35B-14B parameters, ev...