{"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/task-circuit-quantization-leveraging","title":"Task-Circuit Quantization: Leveraging Knowledge Localization and Interpretability for Compression","arxiv_id":"2504.07389","date":"2025-04-10","proceeding":null,"authors":["Hanqi Xiao","Yi-Lin Sung","Elias Stengel-Eskin","Mohit Bansal"],"abstract":"Post-training quantization (PTQ) reduces a model's memory footprint by mapping full precision weights into low bit weights without costly retraining, but can degrade its downstream performance especially in low 2- to 3-bit settings. We develop a new mixed-precision PTQ approach, Task-Circuit Quantization (TaCQ), that draws parallels to automated circuit discovery, directly conditioning the quantization process on specific weight circuits -- which we define as sets of weights associated with downstream task performance. These weights are kept as 16-bit weights, while others are quantized, maintaining performance while only adding a marginal memory cost. Specifically, TaCQ contrasts unquantized model weights with a uniformly-quantized model to estimate the expected change in weights due to quantization and uses gradient information to predict the resulting impact on task performance, allowing us to preserve task-specific weights. We compare TaCQ-based quantization to existing mixed-precision quantization methods when conditioning both on general-purpose and task-specific data. Across QA, math reasoning, and text-to-SQL tasks for both Llama-3 and Qwen2.5, we find that TaCQ outperforms baselines using the same calibration data and a lower weight budget, achieving major improvements in the 2 and 3-bit regime. With only 3.1 bits we are able to recover 96% of Llama-3-8B-Instruct's unquantized 16-bit MMLU performance, obtaining a 5.25% absolute improvement over SPQR. We also observe consistently large gains over existing methods in the 2-bit regime, with an average gain of 14.74% over the strongest baseline, SliM-LLM. Moreover, we observe a 7.20% gain without conditioning on specific tasks, showing TaCQ's ability to identify important weights is not limited to task-conditioned settings.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.07389v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.07389v1.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":"task-circuit-quantization-leveraging","repo_url":"https://github.com/the-inscrutable-x/tacq","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"mmlu","task_name":"MMLU"},{"task_slug":"math","task_name":"Math"},{"task_slug":"quantization","task_name":"Quantization"},{"task_slug":"text-to-sql","task_name":"Text to SQL"},{"task_slug":"text-to-sql","task_name":"Text-To-SQL"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2504.07389","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}