QUASAR: Lowering the Loss Floor of Quantization-Aware Training with Loss-Aware Reconstruction

Excerpt

arXiv:2608.13966v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As large language model inference shifts toward lower precision, post-training quantization (PTQ) becomes increasingly brittle, making quantization-aware training (QAT) essential for preserving model quality. However, QAT computes the loss and surrogate gradients using a lossy reconstruction of latent full-precision weights, while applying updates to the latent weights themselves. This mismatch can lead to suboptimal training trajectories and a hig