OSC: Hardware Efficient W4A4 Quantization via Outlier Separation in Channel Dimension
While 4-bit quantization is essential for high-throughput deployment of Large Language Models, activation outliers often lead to significant accuracy degradation due to the restricted dynamic range of low-bit formats. In this paper, we systematically investigate the spatial distribution of outliers and demonstrate a token-persistent structural clustering effect, where high-magnitude outliers consistently occupy fixed channels across tokens. Building on this insight, we propose OSC, a hardware-efficient framework for outlier suppression. During inference, OSC executes a dual-path computation consisting of a low-precision 4-bit General Matrix Multiplication (GEMM) path and a high-precision ...
| Authors | Zhiyuan Zhang, Yanzhao Li, Zhiqiang Zou et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 14 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 14 April 2026 |
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