---
license: llama3.1
library_name: transformers
pipeline_tag: text-generation
base_model: meta-llama/Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct
base_model_relation: quantized
tags:
  - gsq
  - gumbel-softmax
  - quantization
  - ptq
  - llama
  - llama-3.1
  - vllm
  - humming
  - arxiv:2604.18556
---

# Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct — 3-bit GSQ

3-bit quantization of [`meta-llama/Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct`](https://huggingface.co/meta-llama/Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct)
produced with **GSQ** (Gumbel-Softmax Quantization). The 3-bit setting
recovers near-FP zero-shot accuracy while still using a symmetric group-wise
scalar format that drops into existing INT inference kernels.

- Paper: [GSQ: Highly-Accurate Low-Precision Scalar Quantization for LLMs via Gumbel-Softmax Sampling](https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.18556) (arXiv:2604.18556)
- Paper page on HF: <https://huggingface.co/papers/2604.18556>
- Code: <https://github.com/IST-DASLab/GSQ>
- Collection: <https://huggingface.co/collections/ISTA-DASLab/gsq>

## Quantization details

- **Base model:** [`meta-llama/Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct`](https://huggingface.co/meta-llama/Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct)
- **Bits / weight (effective):** ≈3 bpp
- **Codebook:** 5-level integer (`init + {-2, -1, 0, 1, +2}`) × scale
- **Group size:** 128
- **Format:** [Humming](https://github.com/inclusionAI/humming) (`quant_method: "humming"`, `b_dtype: "uint3"`)
- **Pipeline:** GPTQ initialization → Gumbel-Softmax refinement (Lion optimizer)

### Storage layout (why the HF UI shows I32 + BF16)

The Hugging Face "Tensor types" widget reports the **container dtype** of each
safetensor on disk, not the effective precision of the underlying weights.
This checkpoint uses the **Humming** on-disk layout (exact-width packing — no
sub-byte values are padded into a wider container). For every quantized
`Linear` layer with original weight shape `[out_features, in_features]`, the
following tensors are stored:

| Tensor                       | Dtype | Shape on disk                       | Meaning                                                                       |
|------------------------------|-------|-------------------------------------|-------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| `<layer>.weight`             | I32   | `[out_features, in_features × 3 / 32]` | 3-bit values bit-packed along the input dim, LSB-first: 32 weights pack into exactly 3 INT32 words (≈10.67 weights per word). |
| `<layer>.weight_scale`       | BF16  | `[out_features, in_features / 128]` | One symmetric scale per group of `group_size = 128` weights along the input dim. |
| Attention / norms / embed / LM-head | BF16 | unchanged                  | Not quantized; copied from the base checkpoint.                                |

**Example** (`model.layers.0.mlp.gate_proj`, original `[28672, 8192]`):
`weight` = `[28672, 768]` I32 (since `8192 × 3 / 32 = 768`),
`weight_scale` = `[28672, 64]` BF16 (since `8192 / 128 = 64`).

So although the UI says "I32 + BF16", the **effective storage** per quantized
weight is `3 bits (packed) + 16 bits / 128 (group scale) ≈ 3.13 bpp`. The
`quantization_config` block in `config.json` is:

```json
{
  "quant_method": "humming",
  "b_dtype": "uint3",
  "weight_scale_group_size": 128,
  "weight_scale_type": "group",
  "has_zero_point": false,
  "ignore": ["lm_head", "embed_tokens"]
}
```

Loading this checkpoint requires vLLM plus the
[`humming`](https://github.com/inclusionAI/humming) kernels (`pip install
humming-kernels`). See **Serving with vLLM** below.

> Note: GSQ training first writes shards in `compressed-tensors`
> `pack-quantized` format (where a 3-bit codebook is padded into a 4-bit
> INT32 container). The published checkpoint here has been re-packed via
> `convert_to_humming.py` into exact-width 3-bit Humming storage, which is
> why the on-disk size is ≈3 bpp rather than the ≈4 bpp you'd see if the
> intermediate CT format had been uploaded directly.

## Serving with vLLM

Install the Humming kernels (required for vLLM to load this checkpoint):

```bash
pip install humming-kernels
```

```bash
vllm serve ISTA-DASLab/Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct-3Bit-GSQ \
  --tensor-parallel-size 2
```

## Citation

```bibtex
@article{gsq2026,
  title  = {GSQ: Highly-Accurate Low-Precision Scalar Quantization for LLMs via Gumbel-Softmax Sampling},
  author = {Dadgarnia, Alireza and Tabesh, Soroush and Nikdan, Mahdi and Helcig, Michael and Kurti{\'c}, Eldar and Kleinegger, Max and Alistarh, Dan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.18556},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.18556}
}
```