Hand motion carries the finest-grained information in human activity, yet the representations behind hand generation, understanding, and robot learning are overwhelmingly continuous--joint angles or MANO parameters. These are accurate but unstructured: a finger cannot be indexed or edited as a symbol, and nothing marks a pose as anatomically valid. Discrete symbolic representations supply exactly this structure, and Hand Labanotation (HL) has shown they are feasible for the hand, writing motion as a T x 40 grid of one fixed direction symbol per bone. Building on this grid, we ask the question underneath it: the anatomical unit a symbol should span--bone, finger, or whole hand. DigitCode answers it by adapting, grouping, and layering HL's alphabet along the hand's unit hierarchy within one code, cutting the symbolic representation's quantization error by three quarters. The lever is the unit, not the quantizer family: at a fixed unit, training-free and learned strong quantizers are interchangeable on reconstruction, while moving down the anatomical hierarchy is what shifts accuracy. The hierarchy also tracks what downstream tasks need. Because a finger is a genuine, enumerable unit, one per-finger token doubles as a training-free, editable handle for jobs a continuous representation cannot address--repairing malformed generated hands, and retargeting them onto robots. We release HandTok, a reproducible testbed, so hand tokenizers can be compared unit-for-unit. Project page: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03127
Static quantization assigns one weight precision to every denoising step. To preserve quality, that precision must accommodate the most quantization-sensitive step, even though many other steps can tolerate fewer bits. The resulting model may satisfy its memory budget, but it repeatedly pays worst-case arithmetic throughout the denoising trajectory. We introduce Temporal-Adaptive Bit Sparsification Quantization (TASQ) to separate these two costs. TASQ stores one shared maximum-precision weight buffer and learns a Temporal-Spatial LSB Mask that selects a lower effective precision for each layer and denoising stage by truncating least-significant bits. Storage therefore remains fixed by the worst case, while BitOPs decrease at less sensitive stages without per-stage weight copies or runtime search. A Temporal-Precision Engine maps the learned schedule to bit-serial execution, where cycles scale with effective precision and switching precision has no measured cycle overhead. On PixArt-Sigma, SANA-1.6B, and SDXL-Turbo, TASQ achieves quality comparable to static quantization with less computation. Together with the Temporal-Precision Engine, it reduces execution cycles by 25 to 50 percent over static quantization and by 6.1 to 7.5x over a naive static 8-bit bit-serial execution. Code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03057
The key-value (KV) cache is the primary memory bottleneck in long-context LLM inference. Existing approaches attack it from opposite ends: eviction methods permanently discard tokens, degrading performance whenever a discarded token later proves essential, while quantization methods retain all tokens at low precision but offer limited compression. We propose AnchorKV, a compression scheme that shrinks the cache by $20\times$ without discarding a single token. AnchorKV represents the cache using a small set of anchors stored exactly, expresses every other token through its most similar anchor, and refines only those whose approximation most affects the model's output. AnchorKV consistently preserves accuracy across models and datasets, retaining 99% of the full-cache score at the 70B scale, while keeping the entire context at a fraction of its cost.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.02901
Deploying vision-language models (VLMs) for safety-critical spatial reasoning on resource-constrained autonomous driving platforms requires both compact model size and reliable metric grounding. We present MoRAL (Multimodal Reasoning for Autonomous Language Models), a two-stage fine-tuning pipeline that teaches Cosmos-Reason2-2B to first read a physics-encoded Bird's Eye View (BEV) representation and then reason over it for driving decisions. The BEV image encodes LiDAR metric distance as color bands, object class as cluster morphology, and radar Doppler velocity as directional wedge overlays, externalizing spatial perception into the input image so that no learned 3D backbone is required at inference. Stage 1 fine-tunes the vision encoder on 60,000 grounding records; zero-shot baselines produce no parseable BEV outputs, confirming the vocabulary requires explicit training. Stage 2 fine-tunes the full model (52M parameters, 2.4% of total) on 57,696 chain-of-thought records generated by Cosmos-Reason2-8B as teacher, spanning eight driving question types. On 2,304 held-out nuScenes frames evaluated by Gemma 4 (31B) calibrated against human review, MoRAL wins seven of eight question types over a zero-shot 8B baseline despite using four times fewer parameters, with the largest margins on question types requiring structured multi-step physics reasoning. Emergency braking recall improves from 10.8% to 47.8%, output degeneration falls from 94.1% to 20.8%, and the full pipeline fits a consumer 8 GB GPU at 42 tok/s without quantization. These results establish a reproducible foundation for compact, physics-grounded VLM reasoning on mobile edge platforms.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.02449
Weight-only quantization substantially reduces the storage of large language model (LLM) transformer blocks, but practical backends often retain the final language-modeling head (LM-head) in BF16 or FP16. Quantizing this projection naively can strongly perturb the vocabulary-logit distribution. We present ARCHead, a packed LM-head compressor that combines a quantized low-rank core, group-wise INT4 residuals, and a low-rank correction fitted in an activation-derived metric. ARCHead stores no dense BF16 head and reduces persistent LM-head storage by 3.7-3.9x. On Qwen3-8B-Base, it uses 25.6% of BF16 head storage while attaining 1.007 relative perplexity; storage-matched naive INT4 yields 1.14-1.16. Replacing the BF16 head left by AWQ or bitsandbytes adds only 0.006-0.007 cross-entropy, with less than 2% throughput change in our measurements. ARCHead therefore complements block quantizers by compressing the large output projection they can leave untouched. Code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.02703
Analog compute-in-memory (CIM) enables energy-efficient neural network inference, but device variation and read noise can severely degrade low-bit quantized models. Existing CIM-oriented quantization methods mainly minimize ideal quantization error, ignoring the hardware noise floor and thus causing inefficient precision allocation. We propose NANQ, a noise-aware mixed-precision non-uniform quantization framework for analog CIM. NANQ models magnitude-dependent weight noise from measured responses of an eFlash CIM array and converts the noise profile into an adaptive quantization density, assigning finer resolution to low-noise regions while avoiding ineffective precision in noise-dominated regions. It further assigns layer-wise bit-widths by identifying each layer's precision saturation point under hardware noise using a unified threshold. On-chip experiments on an eFlash CIM SoC show that, under 2-bit weight-magnitude quantization, NANQ improves vision-model accuracy by 8.05 percentage points and reduces language-model PPL by 54.7% on average over PowerQuant. Mixed-precision NANQ captures most of the gains obtainable from additional quantization resources with only 3.2-3.8 equivalent bits.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.02700
Visual AutoRegressive Modeling (VAR) has excelled in natural image generation via next-scale prediction, but its use on topology-structured data like human skeletons is still unexplored. VARPose is proposed to adaptively densify 2D sparse poses, thereby enriching the anatomical information available for 3D lifting models. Our core contributions are twofold. First, we introduce a Granularity-agnostic Pose Tokenizer (GPT), which employs a single hybrid codebook and a residual quantization strategy to encode poses of varying densities into a unified, multi-scale discrete representation. Our results demonstrate the strong generalizability of this representation. By decoupling the representation from the projection, we can successfully decode novel pose granularities using a frozen codebook with a retrained decoder. Second, we propose UniSkelar, a unified autoregressive model that treats "joint density" as "scale". UniSkelar learns to predict the token sequence for the next density level in a coarse-to-fine manner, conditioned on the sparsest pose. VARPose not only outperforms state-of-the-art methods and generalizes to unseen granularities, but also confers tangible performance gains on downstream tasks, such as 3D Pose Estimation and Human Mesh Recovery, through 2D pose densification. Our code and model are available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.02214
The key-value (KV) cache has become a major memory and bandwidth bottleneck in long-context large language model inference, making ultra-low-bit quantization increasingly important. However, existing rotation-based INT2 methods optimize cache statistics or proxy errors before the complete attention readout, even though the model is ultimately affected by the error propagated through attention and the output projection $W_O$. To address this mismatch, we propose \textit{OptR}, an output-aware rotation method that minimizes post-$W_O$ attention-output error. OptR decomposes the post-$W_O$ attention-output error into key- and value-induced terms and learns per-head orthogonal corrections through the full INT2 quantization and attention path. OptR further applies an attention-equivalent key reparameterization to reduce large channel-wise offsets without changing the softmax distribution. Across three models and five reasoning and coding benchmarks, OptR consistently improves both QuaRot and OSCAR and strengthens long-context retrieval, while preserving the paged KV-cache format with negligible inference overhead.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.02691
End-to-end (E2E) autonomous driving algorithms require rigorous closed-loop validation in simulation environments offering high visual fidelity, strong interactivity, and real-time performance. Existing approaches, from game engines to static neural rendering, inherently trade off these requirements and struggle with the dynamic scene composition essential for E2E testing. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel decoupled 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) framework tailored for large-scale E2E evaluation. We fundamentally decompose scenes into a high-fidelity static background and manipulable dynamic agents using an object-centric canonical representation. To resolve resulting representational conflicts, we introduce three targeted modules: (1) asset compression via perceptual pruning and vector quantization for real-time traffic rendering; (2) map-guided geometric registration leveraging semantic topology to strictly align trajectories; and (3) proxy-based relighting transferring ambient illumination for seamless photometric integration. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DecoupleGS achieves a balanced fidelity-efficiency trade-off, improves metric and photometric consistency, and provides a practical closed-loop sensor simulation platform for E2E autonomous driving evaluation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01761
KV cache compression is commonly evaluated by final-answer accuracy, implicitly assuming that preserving the answer also preserves the reasoning that supports it. We test this assumption for large reasoning models and show that it can fail: under compression, correct answers and the validity of their visible supporting rationales can be preserved at different rates. We study this failure with a controlled fixed-trace replay protocol, which holds reasoning content fixed and isolates whether compression preserves usable information from an already available trace. We evaluate ten token-eviction KV compression methods and one quantization method on three models across mathematical reasoning, scientific QA, clinical calculation, and long-context retrieval. We measure final accuracy, answer-chain consistency, and perturbation faithfulness. Across tasks, token-eviction methods can preserve competitive final-answer accuracy while substantially degrading chain support or perturbation faithfulness. We call this the answer-evidence gap. A coverage-preserving quantization control is substantially less affected, suggesting that the failure is tied less to KV memory reduction itself than to losing access to parts of the reasoning trace. Code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01631
The emergence of transformer-based deep learning models has brought unprecedented performance across various domains, particularly in natural language processing and computer vision. However, deploying these models, especially on resource-constrained devices, poses significant challenges due to their high computational complexity and large memory size and bandwidth requirements. This complexity has led researchers to use low-bit model weights to reduce memory usage and improve efficiency. In addition to reducing processing and memory demands, quantization introduces another useful property: value locality, where the extremely large number of parameters are restricted to a limited range of values. To fully take advantage of this locality, this paper presents DeVIT, an acceleration method for vision transformers that leverages differential computation to enable multiplier-less matrix multiplication.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01343
We propose ScaleQ-1.58, a scalable ternary post-training quantization (PTQ) framework for reasoning LLMs. Its core insight stems from an empirical finding: although modern LLMs are typically trained to exhibit chain-of-thought reasoning capabilities, in the PTQ regime, even the latest CAT-Q method based on learning-based differentiable ternarization still leads to performance collapse on challenging mathematics and coding tasks when using conventional calibration schemes that ignore the model's reasoning process. Driven by this finding, we introduce a simple calibration approach, Attend to Your Own Thoughts (AYOT), where reasoning traces and final answers generated by the pre-trained high-precision target LLM on a proper set of calibration samples are used as the context input during the ternarization process, along with the corresponding questions. ScaleQ-1.58 is formed by simply integrating AYOT with CAT-Q, which demonstrates several scaling properties: (1) with only 4M calibration tokens, Qwen3-1.7B ternarized by ScaleQ-1.58 reaches over 90.52% of the performance of the prior best BitNet b1.58 2B4T averaged over 4 mathematics and coding tasks, and our ternary Qwen3-4B shows an absolute gain of 8.97%, while requiring 1,000,000x fewer calibration tokens for quantization; (2) ScaleQ-1.58 generalizes well to both dense and MoE architectures, with performance improving as model scale increases (up to 235B parameters); (3) ScaleQ-1.58 demonstrates strong generalization across tasks of varying difficulty levels, including mathematics, coding and scientific logic reasoning, as well as commonsense reasoning and basic language generation; (4) its performance continues to improve as the number of calibration tokens increases. Notably, AYOT also exhibits strong generalization ability across other quantization bit-widths. Code will be available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01078
We introduce this http URL, a foundation model designed for efficient on-device deployment, real-tim inference, and strong task capability. It includes a dense model (1M, 270M, and 1B) with a context length of 64K. We designed a new hybrid architecture that combines a convolutional key-value gated mixer with local-global attention to reduce the KV-cache memory that tends to increase exponentially with long context. This architecture delivers up to X4.9 faster prefill and decoding speeds on the NPUs compared to models of a similar scale models. From a 2T tokens candidate corpus, this http URL is trained on a curated 0.5T tokens subset without knowledge distillation. This is the most data-efficient of the existing foundation models. All models are released with open weights and deployment binaries for ONNX, Qualcomm NPU, and Apple ANE making this http URL a practical base for edge applications that need fast, memory-efficient inference and strong task capabilities. Furthermore, to expand the ecosystem of on-device generative language models, we are introducing the this http URL-1M that can be deployed on Micro-Controller Units (MCUs), a Tiny Language Model (TLM). this http URL-1M is the first generative language model to achieve 20 TPS with W4A32 quantization on the ARM Cortex-M7 CPU of the STM32H747I-DISCO.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01034
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models have become a dominant architecture for large-scale AI services, yet deploying them over geo-distributed heterogeneous edge servers remains challenging. When the Top-k activated experts of a token are spread across multiple servers, the optimal routing depends jointly on cross-server link bandwidth, heterogeneous GPU computing capability, GPU-CPU expert loading delay, instantaneous queueing backlog, and replica-level quantization quality loss. Existing distributed inference and MoE serving methods address these factors separately and do not provide a unified framework for online multi-server collaborative routing. In this paper, we propose HetRoute, a heterogeneous-cost-aware collaborative routing framework for distributed edge MoE inference. HetRoute introduces a unified per-assignment cost model that explicitly captures four cost components: cross-server transmission, GPU-CPU offloading, GPU computation with queueing, and quantization-induced quality penalty. Guided by this model, the offline stage determines expert server placement, GPU-CPU residency, and replica precision through a routing-cost-coupled deployment algorithm, while the online stage routes the Top-k activated expert set as a whole by minimizing the bottleneck layer cost via exact enumeration or beam search. Theoretical analysis establishes fallback feasibility, a bound on the number of participating servers, per-layer optimality for small candidate domains, and online computational complexity. Trace-driven evaluation on three MoE models over a heterogeneous 10-server edge testbed shows that HetRoute reduces average inference latency by up to 59.0% and P99 latency by up to 58.0%, cuts cross-server traffic by up to 72.1%, and achieves 2.13x throughput improvement compared with representative baselines, while keeping quality degradation within the configured budget.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.00577
Vector quantization is an old problem but has recently become central to AI infrastructure. It is therefore experiencing a surge of renewed engineering and research activity. This paper provides a unified framework for developing and benchmarking new quantization algorithms. We describe 7 common conceptual quantization primitives and show how to compose them arbitrarily. We then re-express 25 common quantizers as pipelines of these primitives. Finally, we publish VQ-bench as open-source to be extended further and make reproducible benchmarks publicly available.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11240
Deploying large language models in realistic server environments poses challenges, as the system needs to provide high-quality responses with low latency. Quantization is a common approach to reduce the memory footprint and improve inference efficiency, yet its impact on latency and throughput is rarely evaluated under controlled, orchestration-level workloads. In this work we study the quantization trade-offs of two translation model families, EuroLLM \citep{martins2025eurollm} and Hy-MT2 \citep{zheng2026hy} across five models ranging from 1.7B to 22B for efficient deployment on a single A100 or H100 GPU. We demonstrate that combining a document-chunking strategy with W4A8 or W8A8 quantization improves the latency-throughput Pareto-curve under a wide range of workloads. Furthermore, since standard machine translation (MT) benchmarks rely on isolated sentences and fail to capture long-context dynamics, we introduce a document-level evaluation from WMT24++ to assess how text chunking strategies affect translation quality under quantization. Our results reveal that standard segment-level evaluation can fail to predict the interaction between quantization and long-context document translation. While Hy-MT2 remains robust under quantization, EuroLLM shows strong sensitivity and translation quality collapses rapidly for all considered quantization formats. Overall, our experiments show that the trade-off between inference efficiency and translation quality depends not only on the quantization format, but also on the choice of text chunking strategy.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.29397
We address the challenge of securely and efficiently outsourcing AI computations from a trusted but computationally weak client to an untrusted but powerful server, in the setting where the client holds both the input and the model, and the server must learn neither. We present MOSAIC, whose core is a novel matrix-multiplication masking protocol that scales to far larger matrices than prior work, enabling the safe outsourcing of modern workloads such as large transformer inference. By introducing small amounts of noise to the multiplication result and thereby relaxing correctness, MOSAIC achieves optimal asymptotic client overhead and concrete runtimes orders of magnitude faster than prior work. Its security reduces to the decisional LWE and LPN assumptions. Because this noise accumulates across the many layers of a transformer, a key technical challenge is bounding error growth; MOSAIC addresses this with an error-scaling mechanism based on random Hadamard rotations. On large 70B transformer models, MOSAIC's perplexity is comparable to popular quantization approaches and even matches full-precision BF16 inference on HumanEval. Finally, we present an end-to-end implementation showing how ideas like MOSAIC can promise a path towards large-scale confidential AI in modern data centers. Non-confidential inference is already distributed across phase (prefill/decode), layer, and time to maximize utilization of heterogeneous hardware, using RDMA-like networking to move activations, cached KV values, and weights across nodes. MOSAIC enables scaling of confidential compute by keeping the trusted computing base (TCB) small and outsourcing the bulk of the AI computation to untrusted accelerators.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.29221
Post-training quantization (PTQ) has emerged as an effective solution for deploying Vision Transformers (ViTs) on resource-constrained devices. However, existing PTQ methods typically employ uniform bit-widths across transformer components, overlooking their heterogeneous sensitivity to quantization and leading to inefficient precision allocation. In this paper, we propose {MixFrag, a fragility-guided mixed-precision PTQ framework for Vision Transformers. MixFrag first estimates component-level quantization fragility by measuring the Kullback--Leibler (KL) divergence between full-precision and isolated quantized output distributions using a small calibration set. It then formulates bit allocation as a Multiple-Choice Knapsack Problem (MCKP), enabling adaptive layer-wise precision assignment under a target bit budget. Extensive experiments on ImageNet-1K across multiple Vision Transformer architectures demonstrate that MixFrag achieves competitive classification performance under practical mixed-precision settings. Furthermore, evaluations on COCO object detection and instance segmentation show that MixFrag achieves state-of-the-art performance among existing mixed-precision PTQ methods, improving the previous best method by up to 9.6 AP under the challenging MP3/MP3 setting. Additional analyses validate the proposed fragility metric and demonstrate its strong correlation with the learned bit allocation. These results establish MixFrag as an effective framework for mixed-precision post-training quantization of Vision Transformers.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.28589
Large Language Models (LLMs) deployed in dynamic financial environments face a critical challenge: maintaining factual accuracy as market conditions, regulations, and corporate facts change continuously. While 4-bit quantization enables efficient deployment, it severely limits the viability of sequential memory editing: existing methods undergo catastrophic performance degradation under this "quantization stability crisis." We introduce CACHE-UK (Contextual Adaptive Continual Hybrid Editor for UK Finance), a stability-aware memory editing framework specifically designed for domain-specific, quantized LLMs. CACHE-UK integrates three components: a rank-1 LoRA perturbation mechanism that confines edits to the low-rank adapter subspace, a financial domain prioritization module for content-adaptive edit strength, and a closed-loop Stability Controller that tracks "degradation debt" to prevent catastrophic forgetting across sequential updates. Evaluated on a 4-bit quantized OpenLLaMA-3B model with a curated UK financial corpus of 88,021 documents, CACHE-UK reduces knowledge degradation by 11-17% relative to adapted baselines under identical 4-bit constraints -- its most robust effect -- while attaining the highest test success (generalization) rate observed in our setting (28%, a 6 percentage point improvement over the strongest adapted baseline). These results indicate that stability-aware editing can improve factual maintenance in resource-constrained financial LLM deployments, though absolute generalization rates remain low.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.28292
In this study, we revisit three widely used techniques in vector search and utilize them to optimize vector embedding indexing through clustering: dimensionality reduction, quantization, and dimension pruning. We propose an indexing pipeline in which these techniques are applied before clustering, and we focus on how they affect storage footprint, clustering time, and the quality of the resulting centroids for vector search tasks. Our results reveal that using full-precision vectors for clustering is excessive, as even 1-bit codes can achieve near-optimal clustering quality (within 1% of ideal) while reducing storage requirements by 60x and delivering attractive performance gains (Figure 1). We open-source our implementations at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14648