2023/09/06 by Liang Li, Qingyuan Li, Li, Liang +5 · 1 citation
Computer Science · #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Speech Recognition and Synthesis #Topic Modeling
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2309.02784
openalex publication_date 2023/09/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
As the size of large language models (LLMs) continues to grow, model compression without sacrificing accuracy has become a crucial challenge for deployment. While some quantization methods, such as GPTQ, have made progress in achieving acceptable 4-bit weight-only quantization, attempts at lower-bit quantization often result in severe performance degradation. In this paper, we introduce a technique called norm tweaking, which can be used as a plugin in current PTQ methods to achieve high precision while being cost-efficient. Our approach is inspired by the observation that rectifying the quantized activation distribution to match its float counterpart can readily restore accuracy for LLMs. To achieve this, we carefully design a tweaking strategy that includes calibration data generation and channel-wise distance constraint to update the weights of normalization layers for better generalization. We conduct extensive experiments on various datasets using several open-sourced LLMs. Our method demonstrates significant improvements in both weight-only quantization and joint quantization of weights and activations, surpassing existing PTQ methods. On GLM-130B and OPT-66B, our method even achieves the same level of accuracy at 2-bit quantization as their float ones. Our simple and effective approach makes it more practical for real-world applications.