Tareq Mahmoud | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

QTEA: Ternary LLMs with Sparse Residual Salient Weight and By-Column Optimization

Weight-only post-training quantization (PTQ) can alleviate the computational burden of serving large language models (LLMs) at scale. However, existing PTQ methods often fail to generalize across models and suffer severe accuracy loss below 2 bits. Many leverage unstructured sparsity to mitigate this loss, but at the cost of regularity and GPU-friendly execution. We present QTEA, a sub-2-bit PTQ framework that quantizes weights into ternary values and uses salient weights as residual error compensators. To maintain hardware efficiency, residuals are assigned to selected columns with semi-structured $1:4$ sparsity within the salient columns. We further add column-wise rescale refinement to GPTQ-style column-by-column quantization, alternately updating per-column scales and ternary assignments to reduce reconstruction error. We also identify order-dependent error propagation in GPTQ and introduce error decay to attenuate late-stage error accumulation. On Qwen3-14B, QTEA compresses all weights to an effective 1.7 bits per weight while improving average accuracy over the strongest ternary PTQ baseline by 16.7%. It also achieves 1.40$\times$ and 2.61$\times$ lower perplexity on WikiText and C4 respectively. This trend holds on Llama3-8B, where QTEA obtains a 6.6% accuracy gain and 1.34$\times$ / 1.95$\times$ lower perplexity on the same datasets. Finally, we develop a lookup-table based kernel that achieves 7.2$\times$ faster per-token generation over an FP16 baseline. Code is available at https://github.com/Intelligent-Microsystems-Lab/QTEA.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Huff-LLM: End-to-End Lossless Compression for Efficient LLM Inference

As they become more capable, large language models (LLMs) have continued to rapidly increase in size. This has exacerbated the difficulty in running state of the art LLMs on small, edge devices. Standard techniques advocate solving this problem through lossy compression techniques such as quantization or pruning. However, such compression techniques are lossy, and have been shown to change model behavior in unpredictable manners. We propose Huff-LLM, an \emph{end-to-end, lossless} model compression method that lets users store LLM weights in compressed format \emph{everywhere} -- cloud, disk, main memory, and even in on-chip memory/buffers. This allows us to not only load larger models in main memory, but also reduces bandwidth required to load weights on chip, and makes more efficient use of on-chip weight buffers. In addition to the memory savings achieved via compression, we also show latency and energy efficiency improvements when performing inference with the compressed model.

cs.LG↗