Xiaofei He
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.
2018
Discourse Marker Augmented Network with Reinforcement Learning for Natural Language Inference
Boyuan Pan | Yazheng Yang | Zhou Zhao | Yueting Zhuang | Deng Cai | Xiaofei He
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Boyuan Pan | Yazheng Yang | Zhou Zhao | Yueting Zhuang | Deng Cai | Xiaofei He
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Natural Language Inference (NLI), also known as Recognizing Textual Entailment (RTE), is one of the most important problems in natural language processing. It requires to infer the logical relationship between two given sentences. While current approaches mostly focus on the interaction architectures of the sentences, in this paper, we propose to transfer knowledge from some important discourse markers to augment the quality of the NLI model. We observe that people usually use some discourse markers such as “so” or “but” to represent the logical relationship between two sentences. These words potentially have deep connections with the meanings of the sentences, thus can be utilized to help improve the representations of them. Moreover, we use reinforcement learning to optimize a new objective function with a reward defined by the property of the NLI datasets to make full use of the labels information. Experiments show that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on several large-scale datasets.