Guangtao Xue
Author directory2026
HyQuant: Hybrid-Precision Quantization for LLM Attention
Jiatong Ding | Bingxin Xing | Yu Zhang | Dian Ding | Xiaodong Yi | Xianbin Ouyang | Fei Hu Zhou | Kun Zhang | Zhenyu Guo | Hao Pan | Guangtao Xue | Yiming Zhang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Jiatong Ding | Bingxin Xing | Yu Zhang | Dian Ding | Xiaodong Yi | Xianbin Ouyang | Fei Hu Zhou | Kun Zhang | Zhenyu Guo | Hao Pan | Guangtao Xue | Yiming Zhang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Quantization has been widely adopted in LLM training and inference to reduce cost and improve efficiency. However, low-bit quantization of the attention module often introduces large errors at very low bit-widths, causing performance degradation. Existing methods mainly rely on smoothing techniques to handle outliers, while we propose a hybrid quantization design to better balance accuracy and efficiency. Specifically, we propose **HyQuant**, an efficient hybrid quantization framework for LLM attention. HyQuant quantizes most attention states into low-bit formats while retaining a small set of vertical-line tokens and local-window states in high precision. These accuracy-critical regions are selected using lightweight vertical-line-aware attention-pattern signals, reducing quantization error with limited overhead. In the Prefill stage, HyQuant uses a hybrid-precision quantized attention operator that preserves vertical-line tokens and a local sliding window in full precision while quantizing the remaining context. In the Decode stage, HyQuant applies the same principle to KV-cache compression and fuses KV dequantization with attention computation to improve memory and hardware efficiency. Across diverse tasks, models, and datasets, HyQuant maintains nearly lossless accuracy with a simple design, demonstrating the efficiency and practical feasibility of hybrid quantization for LLM attention.
2025
EoT: Evolution of Thoughts for Complex Reasoning Tasks
Qin Hua | Jiaqi Sun | Shiyou Qian | Dingyu Yang | Jian Cao | Guangtao Xue
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Qin Hua | Jiaqi Sun | Shiyou Qian | Dingyu Yang | Jian Cao | Guangtao Xue
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Knowledge-based complex reasoning remains a significant challenge for large language models (LLMs) with in-context learning. To tackle this issue, previous studies focus on ensuring behavior fidelity, factuality, or reliability in generated reasoning processes that guide LLMs to produce solutions. However, these studies often neglect the simultaneous optimization on all these three aspects for each thought. The main challenges are the lack of comprehensive assessment mechanisms and the difficulty of efficient thought-level optimization. This paper introduces the Evolution of Thoughts (EoT) framework, which enhances the factuality, fidelity, and reliability of each thought in the reasoning process through a few LLM inferences. We propose a thought assessment method that is sensitive to knowledge and LLM behaviors, using three scorers to evaluate each thought by considering domain context, semantic alignment, and behavior impact. Additionally, we establish a self-reflective evolution mechanism to facilitate each reasoning process generation in a single-forward inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, for knowledge-based complex tasks, EoT improves the factuality and fidelity of reasoning processes by approximately 16.5% and 48.8%, respectively, while enhancing LLM reasoning capability by about 6.2%, outperforming advanced approaches.