TEQ: Trainable Equivalent Transformation for Quantization of LLMs
Authors: name: Wenhua Cheng, name: Yiyang Cai, name: Kaokao Lv, name: Haihao Shen

As large language models (LLMs) become more prevalent, there is a growing
need for new and improved quantization methods that can meet the
computationalast layer demands of these modern architectures while maintaining
the accuracy. In this paper, we present TEQ, a trainable equivalent
transformation that preserves the FP32 precision of the model output while
taking advantage of low-precision quantization, especially 3 and 4 bits
weight-only quantization. The training process is lightweight, requiring only
1K steps and fewer than 0.1 percent of the original model's trainable
parameters. Furthermore, the transformation does not add any computational
overhead during inference. Our results are on-par with the state-of-the-art
(SOTA) methods on typical LLMs. Our approach can be combined with other methods
to achieve even better performance. The code is available at
https://github.com/intel/neural-compressor.