GPTVQ: The Blessing of Dimensionality for LLM Quantization
Authors: name: Mart van Baalen, name: Andrey Kuzmin, name: Markus Nagel, name: Peter Couperus, name: Cedric Bastoul, name: Eric Mahurin, name: Tijmen Blankevoort, name: Paul Whatmough

In this work we show that the size versus accuracy trade-off of neural
network quantization can be significantly improved by increasing the
quantization dimensionality. We propose the GPTVQ method, a new fast method for
post-training vector quantization (VQ) that scales well to Large Language
Models (LLMs). Our method interleaves quantization of one or more columns with
updates to the remaining unquantized weights, using information from the
Hessian of the per-layer output reconstruction MSE. Quantization codebooks are
initialized using an efficient data-aware version of the EM algorithm. The
codebooks are then updated, and further compressed by using integer
quantization and SVD-based compression. GPTVQ establishes a new state-of-the
art in the size vs accuracy trade-offs on a wide range of LLMs such as Llama-v2
and Mistral. Furthermore, our method is efficient: on a single H100 it takes
between 3 and 11 hours to process a Llamav2-70B model, depending on
quantization setting. Lastly, with on-device timings for VQ decompression on a
mobile CPU we show that VQ leads to improved latency compared to using a 4-bit
integer format.