Dong AN
Author directory2026
InfoQuant: Shaping Activation Distributions for Low-Bit LLM Quantization
Ke Li | Dong AN | Xiaoling Zang | Can Ye | Liang Xie | Qibo Qiu | Chen Shen | Xiaofei He | Wenxiao Wang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Ke Li | Dong AN | Xiaoling Zang | Can Ye | Liang Xie | Qibo Qiu | Chen Shen | Xiaofei He | Wenxiao Wang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Low-bit activation quantization remains a major bottleneck in efficient large language model (LLM) deployment. The difficulty is not only that activations contain outliers, but that their transformed distributions often remain poorly matched to a low-bit uniform quantizer. Existing post-training quantization (PTQ) methods suppress peaks, balance channels, or minimize reconstruction error, yet they rarely specify what activation distribution is actually easy to discretize. As a result, activations may appear numerically smoother while still incurring large quantization error because the quantization range remains wide or most values collapse into a few levels near the mean. We recast activation transformation as quantizer-facing distribution design and analyze quantization error from an information-theoretic perspective. Our analysis shows that quantization-friendly activations should jointly have a smaller numerical range and sufficient dispersion within that range. Guided by this analysis, we propose InfoQuant, a train-free method that employs Peak Suppression Orthogonal Transformation (PSOT) to shape activations into more quantization-friendly distributions. We further introduce adaptive outlier-token selection to improve the robustness of PSOT during optimization. Across multiple LLM families, InfoQuant consistently outperforms prior PTQ and end-to-end training baselines. Under W4A4KV4, InfoQuant preserves approximately 97% of the floating-point zero-shot accuracy on average. Code is available at: https://github.com/LLIKKE/InfoQuant.