Scale Sensitivity in Low-Bit Post-Training Quantization: Curvature of the Quantization Error Landscape
Post-training quantization (PTQ) methods in the GPTQ family minimize a layer-wise reconstruction error on a uniform grid whose scale must be chosen; the common max-based choice degrades sharply at low bit-widths. We study how sensitive this objective is to the scale. For a layer with i.i.d. Gaussian weights and calibration activations of sufficiently large effective rank, we prove that, as the width grows, the normalized round-to-nearest loss converges with high probability, uniformly over all scales, to the mean-squared error of a uniform quantizer applied to a standard Gaussian; we verify the effective-rank condition for wide, randomly initialized MLPs with odd Lipschitz activations and...
| Authors | Jonas von Berg, Massimiliano Datres, Carlo Kneißl et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 29 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 29 September 2026 |
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