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Quantizing more of a model can actually improve its fidelity, because quantization errors in different layers can cancel each other out.

Ali Taha describes research showing that quantizing more layers can yield better quality and 20% more throughput, by mathematically predicting which layers' quantization errors cancel, measured via KL divergence against the full-precision model. ✦ AI generated

Ali Taha · Latent Space · 2026-08-03 · original ↗

plays this moment only · 28:27 — 31:57

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Is quantization always strictly worse?

What Joshua showed in his mathematical proof where he had like a verifier in, is that you can predict which layers are going to have quantization errors that will cancel out with each other, and you choose to quantize those layers. And so the result of doing this mathematical quantization is you end up with a model that's 20% more quantized than another provider, so you get 20% more throughput of it because there's more layers than running an NVFP4, and your quality is better than that other quant because the layers that you chose to quantize have their errors cancel out, like one layer skewed to the right one layer skewed to the left, one layer skewed to the right. Your final logits distribution is more similar to the original distribution of the model, so you have better fidelity. And so the way we proved this was with KL divergence.

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28:22Quantization and Canceling Errors

32:15The Race to 10× Faster Inference

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