Qibo Qiu
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.
HeteroCache: A Dynamic Retrieval Approach to Heterogeneous KV Cache Compression for Long-Context LLM Inference
Zhiyuan Shi | Qibo Qiu | Xuefeng | Zhonglin Jiang | Li Yu | Jian Jiang | Xiaofei He | Wenxiao Wang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Zhiyuan Shi | Qibo Qiu | Xuefeng | Zhonglin Jiang | Li Yu | Jian Jiang | Xiaofei He | Wenxiao Wang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
The linear memory growth of the KV cache poses a significant bottleneck for LLM inference in long-context tasks. Existing static compression methods often fail to preserve globally important information. Although recent dynamic retrieval approaches attempt to address this issue, they typically suffer from coarse-grained caching strategies and incur high I/O overhead. To overcome these limitations, we propose HeteroCache, a training-free dynamic compression framework. Our method is built on two key insights: attention heads exhibit diverse temporal heterogeneity, and there is significant spatial redundancy among heads within the same layer.Guided by these insights, HeteroCache categorizes heads based on stability and similarity, applying a fine-grained weighting strategy that allocates larger cache budgets to heads with rapidly shifting attention to capture context changes.Furthermore, it features a hierarchical storage mechanism where representative heads monitor attention drift to trigger asynchronous, on-demand context retrieval, thereby hiding I/O latency.Experiments demonstrate that HeteroCache achieves state-of-the-art performance on long-context benchmarks and accelerates decoding by up to 3× compared to the original model with a 224K context. Our code is available at https://github.com/ponytaill/HeteroCache.