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.
Read the story and explore more from the AspireAI community.
Two sparse-autoencoder analyses have resisted scaling: matching semantically similar features across layers, and compressing large feature circuits into interpretable supernodes. This paper argues both are the same underlying problem, estimating semantic distances between SAE features that sit on different activation manifolds. Its representation treats each feature not as a single decoder vector but as an activation-weighted distribution over the hidden states expressing it, projects those distributions into a shared reference space, and compares them with Wasserstein distance. The representation is proved invariant to activation rescaling and stable under perturbation, and recovers true matches under finite-sample margin conditions. Empirically it outperformed decoder-vector and LLM-based baselines and captured subtle functional distinctions between related features, and it compressed large feature circuits into interpretable supernodes automatically. The limitation is that this is interpretability tooling: the paper demonstrates better feature matching and circuit compression, not that downstream interpretability claims become more accurate.