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Abstract - A KL Lens on Quantization: Fast, Forward-Only Sensitivity for Mixed-Precision SSM-Transformer Models
Deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) on edge devices faces severe computational and memory constraints, limiting real-time processing and on-device intelligence. Hybrid architectures combining Structured State Space Models (SSMs) with transformer-based LLMs offer a balance of efficiency and performance. Aggressive quantization can drastically cut model size and speed up inference, but its uneven effects on different components require careful management. In this work, we propose a lightweight, backpropagation-free, surrogate-based sensitivity analysis framework to identify hybrid SSM-Transformer components most susceptible to quantization-induced degradation. Relying solely on forward-pass metrics, our method avoids expensive gradient computations and retraining, making it suitable for situations where access to in-domain data is limited due to proprietary restrictions or privacy constraints. We also provide a formal analysis showing that the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence metric better captures quantization sensitivity for Language modeling tasks than widely adopted alternatives such as mean squared error (MSE) and signal-to-quantization-noise ratio (SQNR). Through extensive experiments on SSM and hybrid architectures, our ablation studies confirm that KL-based rankings align with observed performance drops and outperform alternative metrics. This framework enables the practical deployment of advanced hybrid models on resource-constrained edge devices with minimal accuracy loss. We further validate our approach with real-world on-device profiling on Intel Lunar Lake hardware, demonstrating that KL-guided mixed-precision achieves near-FP16 perplexity with model sizes and throughput competitive with Uniform INT4 on both CPU and GPU execution modes. Code is available at this https URL.
量化视角下的KL透镜:针对混合精度SSM-Transformer模型的快速、仅前向传播敏感度分析 /
A KL Lens on Quantization: Fast, Forward-Only Sensitivity for Mixed-Precision SSM-Transformer Models
1️⃣ 一句话总结
这篇论文提出了一种无需反向传播的快速量化敏感度分析方法,通过KL散度指标精准识别混合架构模型中对量化最敏感的组件,从而在资源受限的边缘设备上高效部署大型语言模型,同时保持高精度。