Auto-regressive Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on coding tasks, but incur high memory and inference costs. Diffusion-based language models (d-LLMs) offer bounded inference cost via iterative denoising, but their behavior under post-training quantization (PTQ) has been sparsely explored. We investigate the application and robustness of PTQ techniques, specifically GPTQ and a modified Hessian-Aware Quantization (HAWQ) algorithm, on a diffusion-based coding LLM (CoDA) and observe that these methods applied to CoDA exhibit greater robustness at low bitwidths compared to Qwen3-1.7B, its auto-regressive counterpart, under a standardized evaluation pipeline. We find that in our setup, CoDA exhibits greater robustness at low bitwidths (2-4 bits), with smaller accuracy degradation across HumanEval and MBPP benchmarks. Additionally, mixed-precision configurations derived from HAWQ provide smooth trade-offs across accuracy, latency, and memory. The results suggest that diffusion LLMs may offer advantages for efficient deployment due to more quantization-resilience.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used across many domains, but their scale makes deployment challenging. Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) reduces memory footprint without retraining by leveraging a small calibration set. Recent Hessian-based PTQ methods compensate quantization error via cross-channel dependencies, but such approaches degrade at low bit-widths due to noisy curvature estimates from limited calibration data. We propose DASH-Q, a robust PTQ framework using diagonal Hessian approximation and iterative weighted least squares. By discarding noise-prone dependencies, DASH-Q filters sampling noise while prioritizing the preservation of salient feature power. We outperform other PTQ baselines in ultra low-bit regime, improving zero-shot accuracy by 7.01% on average and up to 14.01% over the strongest baselines across five baseline LLM models, while showing robust and stable performance with very small calibration data.
Post-training quantization (PTQ) of large language models degrades sharply below 4-bit precision. We identify the root cause as residual stream distributional drift: quantization noise injected at each transformer layer accumulates in the shared residual representation, causing KL divergence from the FP16 baseline to grow super-linearly with depth (Pearson r=0.999 with log-perplexity, p<0.001, confirmed across all tested methods and bit-widths). We discover that 84% of LLaMA-3-8B layers exhibit non-Gaussian residual distributions (KS test, p<=0.05), and that per-layer residual stream variance grows 6,548x across depth. We propose RDQ (Residual Distribution Quantization), a PTQ framework whose central contribution is Cascaded Error Compensation (CEC): a sequential calibration procedure that captures the actual drifted activations each layer receives (computed by running calibration data through already-quantized upstream layers) and fits per-channel AWQ-style scales against those drifted inputs, with scales folded into preceding RMSNorm weights for exact mathematical equivalence at zero inference overhead. RDQ achieves state-of-the-art results on all three tested architectures: LLaMA-3-8B: 7.55 / 5.62 PPL (W3/W4); Qwen-2.5-7B: 7.46 / 6.38 PPL; Mistral-7B: 6.88 / 5.73 PPL. RDQ beats the best published baseline (LeanQuant/SpinQuant) at every model and bit-width combination, with gains up to -46.4% vs. RTN at W3A16 on LLaMA-3-8B. All output is standard group-128 asymmetric quantization, deployable on Qualcomm AIMET, GGUF, and any standard inference stack at zero runtime overhead.
As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed across heterogeneous hardware with varying resource constraints, the ability to adaptively manage the trade-off between performance and efficiency without retraining is critical. We propose Drop-by-Drop, a novel multi-bitwidth post-training quantization framework that enables inference-time precision control over LLM weights from a single trained model. Our method is theoretically grounded in information theory and successive refinement. We establish that LLM weights, which commonly follow a Gaussian distribution, can be optimally reconstructed with increasing fidelity as additional bits are incorporated, under a weighted mean squared error distortion motivated by LLM loss functions. To realize this in practice, Drop-by-Drop incorporates Matryoshka-style supervision into the loss function, exploiting the structure of additive codebooks. Drop-by-Drop produces a single model where ordered subsets of codebooks yield accurate partial reconstructions at each precision level. This approach significantly reduces storage and memory overhead by allowing a single checkpoint to serve multiple bitwidths, while maintaining competitive perplexity and accuracy across major architectures, such as Qwen, LLaMA, Gemma, and Mistral.