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ResCom repaired the rounding error that 4-bit activation quantization hides, and lifted Llama-3-8B five-shot GSM8K accuracy from 23.96 to 36.16 percent

AspireAI community · arXiv
ResCom shows that most of the accuracy lost to 4-bit activation quantization is recoverable without retraining, by adding a rank-32 correction that uses the activation rounding residual to compensate for the resulting layer-output error, computed in closed form during output-aware calibration. On Llama-3-8B at 4-bit weights and activations it cuts WikiText-2 perplexity from 7.708 to 7.147, adds 2.89 points on MMLU and lifts five-shot GSM8K accuracy from 23.96 to 36.16 percent. The headline numbers come from one model and one bit-width, the evaluated FP32 implementation adds 2.25 percent to 4K prefill time, and the memory saving comes from a separate compact-storage implementation rather than the correction itself.
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