All for 1-Bit: Towards Genuine 1-Bit Post-Training Quantization for LLMs

Zhixiong Zhao, Zukang Xu, Guangyu Sun, Lifeng Liu, Dawei Yang


Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress, yet their massive storage and memory-bandwidth demands still hinder efficient deployment. Weight binarization is a promising solution, but existing binarization-based post-training quantization (PTQ) methods usually far exceed the nominal 1-bit storage target due to hidden overhead. To address this gap, we propose All for 1-Bit (AF1), a genuine 1-bit PTQ framework for LLMs. AF1 comprises two complementary components: (1) Null-space-Aware Binary Factorization (NABF) for improving binary reconstruction through Hessian-aware surrogate reparameterization, null-space-aware binary factorization, and scale-only global reconstruction; and (2) Hierarchical Shapley Allocation (HiSA) for assigning structural capacity using hierarchical Shapley sensitivity. Together, they preserve model accuracy under a strict 1.0-BPW budget in the PTQ setting. Experiments on LLaMA, Qwen, and Gemma families show that AF1 consistently outperforms existing binarization-based PTQ methods in perplexity and zero-shot accuracy. Compared with BF16, AF1 achieves an average 2.5× inference speedup and over 90% memory reduction across evaluated models, providing a practical path toward deployable genuine 1-bit compression for LLMs. The code for reproducibility is available at AF1.
Anthology ID:
2026.emnlp-main.590
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
13527–13558
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.590/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhixiong Zhao, Zukang Xu, Guangyu Sun, Lifeng Liu, and Dawei Yang. 2026. All for 1-Bit: Towards Genuine 1-Bit Post-Training Quantization for LLMs. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 13527–13558, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
All for 1-Bit: Towards Genuine 1-Bit Post-Training Quantization for LLMs (Zhao et al., EMNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.590.pdf