Lossless quantization has usually meant giving up inference speedup. This paper changes that.
SLQ (Statistically-Lossless Quantization) reaches task-lossless compression at 3.3 bits per parameter, and distribution-lossless at 5-6 bpp where the output distribution is practically indistinguishable from the original.
1.7 to 3.6x throughput over BF16 in
@vllm_project. Beats FP8 while staying lossless.
From Michael Helcig,
@_EldarKurtic, and
@DAlistarh.