This study reveals that while the performance scales monotonically with the total number of bits, the reliability scalings are nonlinear, indicating that quantizing moderately sized models offers the best reliability-efficiency trade-off.
Abstract
Quantization is a powerful strategy to build capable and resource-efficient large language models (LLMs) by reducing the bitwidth of the parameters. While quantized LLMs achieve state-of-the-art performance on unperturbed inputs using standard predictive metrics, their performance on perturbed inputs, measured using reliability metrics, remains underexplored, despite its importance for reliable deployment. To address this gap, we first conduct a comprehensive reliability evaluation of quantized LLMs consisting of three key components: (1) Uncertainty: We assess the trustworthiness of LLMs quantized to 2, 3, 4, and 8 bits using six different quantization methods, employing established uncertainty metrics. (2) Calibration: We assess how well-calibrated the uncertainty estimates of quantized models are across model scales and bit precisions. (3) Robustness: We design character-level and word-level input perturbations to evaluate the reliability of quantized models under semantically-preserving variations in the inputs that arise in real-world applications. Second, we characterize how reliability scales with the total number of model bits. Our study reveals that while the performance scales monotonically with the total number of bits, the reliability scalings are nonlinear. A reliability peak occurs for 4-bit quantized models, indicating that quantizing moderately sized models offers the best reliability-efficiency trade-off. Additionally, our empirical findings reveal that quantization enhances the robustness of LLMs to natural input perturbations.
Six state-of-the-art quantization methods are evaluated on two representative large code model families using the multilingual McEval and CoderEval benchmarks for Python and Java to provide practical guidance for selecting quantization strategies for deploying large code models on resource-constrained hardware.
Saima Afrin, MD Zahidul Haque, A. Mastropaolo· arXiv.org· 0 citations
Post-training quantization (PTQ) is widely used to reduce the cost of serving large language models (LLMs), but its accuracy cost is uneven and is often tuned per model. We study where quantization damage occurs and how to allocate a small additional precision budget. Using causal mixed-precision intervention as ground truth (raise each layer to 8-bit in turn and measure the accuracy it recovers) across 9 open-weight models in 4 architecture families, we test 3 intuitive hypotheses: that quantization damage lives in task circuits, where the model computes, or in weight statistics. None of them predicts which layers benefit from restored precision. Recovery is instead diffuse: for 8 of 9 models, recovering 75% of the gap takes roughly half the layers; the lone exception, Qwen3-8B, is sharply concentrated. At a matched precision budget, spending it globally on finer quantization granularity beats locally repairing the most recoverable layers for all 8 group-128-compatible models (all but OpenLLaMA, whose width rules out group-128), by 21-52 points, including the concentrated Qwen3-8B. We report 2 secondary findings: the residual is budget-limited (8-bit is near-lossless in our evaluation across RTN, GPTQ, and AWQ), and the location of peak recovery correlates with architecture within a family, though not across families. Within this budget setting, global granularity is a better default than selectively protecting critical layers. More broadly, cheap signals that correlate with quantization damage do not necessarily identify where restoring precision improves accuracy; this must be tested with causal intervention.
Recurrent Residual Quantization (RRQ) is introduced, a post-training quantization (PTQ) framework that represents weights as a low-bit quantized base together with a sequence of quantized residual corrections, enabling multiple effective precisions from a single checkpoint.
This work systematically study weight-only post-training quantization across bit-widths, quantization methods, model scales and downstream tasks and establishes that quantization degradation is governed by how errors are introduced at the source and how they accumulate across the network.
Chenxi Zhou, Pengfei Cao, Jin Ye et al.· 0 citations
This work proposes Correctness Agreement, a decision-level metric that can measure the intersection of correct predictions between the base model and its quantized variant, and finds that the base and quantized variants usually have a shift in behavior even when accuracy and perplexity are preserved.
Baha Rababah, Shahzeb Qamar, Lorenz Sparrenberg et al.· arXiv.org· 0 citations
Prediction uncertainty is a widely adopted metric for quantifying model confidence, with downstream applications spanning model explanation, data selection, and prediction rollback. Despite its demonstrated utility, the potential of uncertainty quantification to enhance code generation in large language models (LLMs) remains largely underexplored, raising a critical question: to what extent can uncertainty serve as an effective signal for improving LLM-based code generation? To answer this question, we study uncertainty-aware rollback decoding, an inference-time strategy that uses uncertainty signals to identify unreliable generation regions and roll back to earlier valid prefixes without retraining the model. We evaluate this framework on seven code LLMs, five code generation benchmarks, and eight token-level uncertainty signals under a unified decoding setup. Our results show that the complete rollback framework improves over equal-budget restart across the evaluated benchmarks and model settings, with gains of up to 0.26 in pass@1 and 0.35 in AvgTestPassRate on functional code generation benchmarks, and an absolute improvement of up to 6.4\% in Patch-Aligned Safe Rate on Dsec-Python. Among the evaluated signals, information-theoretic measures such as token entropy and negative log-likelihood show the most favorable overall trend, frequently achieving the best or near-best results on standard benchmarks. A component-controlled ablation further shows that feedback-guided rollback provides the main improvement, while uncertainty localization provides an additional gain when checking, budget, rollback, and branch decay are held fixed.
Xianzong Wu, Xiaohong Li, Yuejun Guo et al.· 0 citations
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