The Fourth State: Signed-Zero Ternary for Stable LLM Quantization (and More)

Jeffrey Uhlmann

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arXiv · 2508.05905

The Fourth State: Signed-Zero Ternary for Stable LLM Quantization (and More)

Jeffrey Uhlmann

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Abstract

Quantization is usually regarded as a means to trade quality of performance for reduced compute requirements, i.e., as a suboptimal approximation. However, if examined in terms of a fixed overall resource budget, a very different perspective arises. We introduce Signed-Zero Ternary (SZT), a 2-bit quantization that deterministically provides gradient information with no forward-path penalty. Our analysis provides evidence that it may improve information density compared to non-quantized alternatives.

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Jeffrey Uhlmann. 2025-08-08. The Fourth State: Signed-Zero Ternary for Stable LLM Quantization (and More). https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05905

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