Beyond Outliers: A Data-Free Layer-wise Mixed-Precision Quantization Approach Driven by Numerical and Structural Dual-Sensitivity
Abstract
NSDS improves layer-wise mixed-precision quantization by separately assessing numerical and structural sensitivity of decomposed weight modules to guide bit allocation without calibration data.
Layer-wise mixed-precision quantization (LMPQ) enables effective compression under extreme low-bit settings by allocating higher precision to sensitive layers. However, existing methods typically treat all intra-layer weight modules uniformly and rely on a single numerical property when estimating sensitivity, overlooking their distinct operational roles and structural characteristics. To address this, we propose NSDS, a novel calibration-free LMPQ framework driven by Numerical and Structural Dual-Sensitivity. Specifically, it first mechanistically decomposes each layer into distinct operational roles and quantifies their sensitivity from both numerical and structural perspectives. These dual-aspect scores are then aggregated into a unified layer-wise metric through a robust aggregation scheme based on MAD-Sigmoid and Soft-OR to guide bit allocation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NSDS consistently achieves superior performance compared to various baselines across diverse models and downstream tasks, without relying on any calibration data.
Get this paper in your agent:
hf papers read 2603.17354 Don't have the latest CLI?
curl -LsSf https://hf.co/cli/install.sh | bash Models citing this paper 1
Datasets citing this paper 0
No dataset linking this paper
Spaces citing this paper 0
No Space linking this paper
Collections including this paper 0
No Collection including this paper