Signed Symmetric Quantization for Few-Bit Integers
The signed integer alphabet contains one more negative representable value than positive. Yet, by convention, the standard symmetric integer quantizer fixes its scale to be strictly positive, which assigns this extra representable value to the negative tail and can force clipping of positive outliers. In this work, we show that, at few-bit precision, such clipping is a non-trivial source of quantization error. Asymmetric quantization addresses this problem with a zero point, shifting the grid toward the observed data range; however, this flexibility is well-known to carry a runtime penalty. For example, in llama.cpp on an AMD EPYC(TM) "Turin" CPU, a 4-bit symmetric format uses up to 9% le...
| Authors | Ian Colbert, Eashan Dash, Pablo Monteagudo-Lago et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 12 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 12 June 2026 |
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