等同性的错觉:大型语言模型中量化效应的统计表征 / The Illusion of Equivalency: Statistical Characterization of Quantization Effects in LLMs
1️⃣ 一句话总结
本文发现,仅用准确率和困惑度评估量化后的大语言模型具有误导性,因为即使在任务性能看似不变的情况下,模型内部决策行为也会发生显著偏差,并揭示了注意力层中不同投影对量化的敏感度差异,从而呼吁引入更能反映行为变化的评估指标。
Post-training quantization is widely used to deploy large language models in resource-constrained settings, yet its evaluation relies almost exclusively on accuracy and perplexity. We show that these metrics fail to capture behavioral changes induced by quantization. We introduce correctness agreement, a decision-level metric that measures overlap in correct predictions between a base model and its quantized variants, independent of absolute accuracy. Across multiple models and quantization schemes from 8-bit to 2-bit, we find that behavioral divergence emerges under moderate quantization even when task performance appears preserved. To explain this effect, we analyze quantization as a structural operator on attention weights and quantify layer-wise distortions using statistical and distributional measures. Our results reveal non-linear breakpoints at low bit-widths and show that query and key projections are consistently more sensitive than value and output projections. These findings expose an illusion of equivalence between base and quantized models and motivate behavioral evaluation beyond conventional performance metrics.
等同性的错觉:大型语言模型中量化效应的统计表征 / The Illusion of Equivalency: Statistical Characterization of Quantization Effects in LLMs
本文发现,仅用准确率和困惑度评估量化后的大语言模型具有误导性,因为即使在任务性能看似不变的情况下,模型内部决策行为也会发生显著偏差,并揭示了注意力层中不同投影对量化的敏感度差异,从而呼吁引入更能反映行为变化的评估指标。
源自 arXiv: 2607.08734