Pre-Registering the Detectable Effect: A Paired-MDE Budget for 4-bit Quantization Benchmarks, with a Pilot Audit
This is a planning-method note with an unpaired pilot audit. We adapt the classical paired-binary sample-size calculation (Miettinen, 1968) to quantization benchmarks, giving a conservative minimum detectable effect (MDE) bound $δ^{*} \le (z_{1-α/2}+z_{1-β})\sqrt{ρ_d/m}$ in the paired item count $m$ and the FP16-NF4 disagreement rate $ρ_d$. The bound turns "how reliable is my quantization claim?" into a one-line budget a benchmark designer can commit to before running. We illustrate the bound on four models and four benchmarks ($k=5$ splits of $n=100$), and add a parallel MMLU prompt-template study to put the bound's quantization-noise scale alongside the prompt-noise scale. Assuming $ρ_d...
| Authors | Zexin Zhuang, Yanhang Li, Zhichao Fan |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 25 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 25 May 2026 |
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