Title: LFQ: Logit-aware Final-block Quantization for Boosting the Generation Quality of Low-Bit Quantized LLMs
Primary area: other topics in machine learning (i.e., none of the above)
Keywords: Efficient Inference, Post-Training Quantization, Large Language Models

Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) continue to scale, low-bit weight-only post-training quantization (PTQ) offers a practical solution to their memory-efficient deployment. Although block-wise PTQ is capable of matching the full-precision (FP) baseline on basic language modeling and understanding, its quality is degraded for \textit{generative} tasks---especially at longer responses and extended chains of thought, which is critical in boosting task accuracy. We attribute this shortfall to two factors: (i) the omission of the unembedding layer (the LM head) in block-wise optimization and (ii) the reliance on the mean squared error (MSE) objective. Both factors cause the token probability distribution of the quantized model to misalign with that of the FP model, yielding notable accuracy drops on text generation benchmarks. To rectify the discrepancy, we introduce \emph{Logit-aware Final-block Quantization (LFQ)}, a simple yet effective enhancement to block-wise PTQ that quantizes the final Transformer block by minimizing the cross-entropy between the logits of the FP model and those of its quantized counterpart. By aligning token probabilities at the logit level in the final block, LFQ consistently improves the accuracy of complex generation tasks over state-of-the-art block-wise PTQ across diverse model families and text generation tasks, while maintaining parity with FP baselines on language modeling and understanding.