{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/quaff-quantized-parameter-efficient-fine","title":"Quaff: Quantized Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning under Outlier Spatial Stability Hypothesis","arxiv_id":"2505.14742","date":"2025-05-20","proceeding":null,"authors":["Hong Huang","Dapeng Wu"],"abstract":"Large language models (LLMs) have made exciting achievements across various domains, yet their deployment on resource-constrained personal devices remains hindered by the prohibitive computational and memory demands of task-specific fine-tuning. While quantization offers a pathway to efficiency, existing methods struggle to balance performance and overhead, either incurring high computational/memory costs or failing to address activation outliers, a critical bottleneck in quantized fine-tuning. To address these challenges, we propose the Outlier Spatial Stability Hypothesis (OSSH): During fine-tuning, certain activation outlier channels retain stable spatial positions across training iterations. Building on OSSH, we propose Quaff, a Quantized parameter-efficient fine-tuning framework for LLMs, optimizing low-precision activation representations through targeted momentum scaling. Quaff dynamically suppresses outliers exclusively in invariant channels using lightweight operations, eliminating full-precision weight storage and global rescaling while reducing quantization errors. Extensive experiments across ten benchmarks validate OSSH and demonstrate Quaff's efficacy. Specifically, on the GPQA reasoning benchmark, Quaff achieves a 1.73x latency reduction and 30% memory savings over full-precision fine-tuning while improving accuracy by 0.6% on the Phi-3 model, reconciling the triple trade-off between efficiency, performance, and deployability. By enabling consumer-grade GPU fine-tuning (e.g., RTX 2080 Super) without sacrificing model utility, Quaff democratizes personalized LLM deployment. The code is available at https://github.com/Little0o0/Quaff.git.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.14742v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.14742v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"quaff-quantized-parameter-efficient-fine","repo_url":"https://github.com/little0o0/quaff","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":null,"task_name":"GPU"},{"task_slug":"quantization","task_name":"Quantization"},{"task_slug":"parameter-efficient-fine-tuning","task_name":"parameter-efficient fine-tuning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2505.14742","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}