QWHA: Quantization-Aware Walsh-Hadamard Adaptation for
  Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning on Large Language Models
Authors: name: Hyesung Jeon; name: Seojune Lee; name: Beomseok Kang; name: Yulhwa Kim; name: Jae-Joon Kim
Published: 2025-09-22 07:21:41

Abstract: The demand for efficient deployment of large language models (LLMs) has
driven interest in quantization, which reduces inference cost, and
parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT), which lowers training overhead. This
motivated the development of quantization-aware PEFT to produce accurate yet
efficient quantized models. In this setting, reducing quantization error prior
to fine-tuning is crucial for achieving high model accuracy. However, existing
methods that rely on low-rank adaptation suffer from limited representational
capacity. Recent Fourier-related transform (FT)-based adapters offer greater
representational power than low-rank adapters, but their direct integration
into quantized models often results in ineffective error reduction and
increased computational overhead. To overcome these limitations, we propose
QWHA, a method that integrates FT-based adapters into quantized models by
employing the Walsh-Hadamard Transform (WHT) as the transform kernel, together
with a novel adapter initialization scheme incorporating adaptive parameter
selection and value refinement. We demonstrate that QWHA effectively mitigates
quantization errors while facilitating fine-tuning, and that its design
substantially reduces computational cost. Experimental results show that QWHA
consistently outperforms baselines in low-bit quantization accuracy and
achieves significant training speedups over existing FT-based adapters. The
code is available at https://github.com/vantaa89/qwha.