Learning under Quantization for High-Dimensional Linear Regression

Abstract

The use of low-bit quantization has emerged as an indispensable technique for enabling the efficient training of large-scale models. Despite its widespread empirical success, a rigorous theoretical understanding of its impact on learning performance remains notably absent, even in the simplest linear regression setting. We present the first systematic theoretical study of this fundamental question, analyzing finite-step stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for high-dimensional linear regression under a comprehensive range of quantization targets: data, label, parameter, activation, and gradient. Our novel analytical framework establishes precise algorithm-dependent and data-dependent excess risk bounds that characterize how different quantization affects learning: parameter, activation, and gradient quantization amplify noise during training; data quantization distorts the data spectrum and introduces additional approximation error. Crucially, we distinguish the effects of two quantization schemes: we prove that for additive quantization (with constant quantization steps), the noise amplification benefits from a suppression effect scaled by the batch size, while multiplicative quantization (with input-dependent quantization steps) largely preserves the spectral structure, thereby reducing the spectral distortion. Furthermore, under common polynomial-decay data spectra, we quantitatively compare the risks of multiplicative and additive quantization, drawing a parallel to the comparison between FP and integer quantization methods. Our theory provides a powerful lens to characterize how quantization shapes the learning dynamics of optimization algorithms, paving the way to further explore learning theory under practical hardware constraints.