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Quantization Meets Reasoning: Exploring LLM Low-Bit Quantization Degradation for Mathematical Reasoning

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arxiv 2501.03035 v4 pith:MTDDT7RZ submitted 2025-01-06 cs.CL cs.AI

Quantization Meets Reasoning: Exploring LLM Low-Bit Quantization Degradation for Mathematical Reasoning

classification cs.CL cs.AI
keywords reasoningquantizationdegradationmathematicalmodelsaccuracyassessmentcomputational
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Large language models have achieved significant advancements in complex mathematical reasoning benchmarks, such as MATH. However, their substantial computational requirements present challenges for practical deployment. Model quantization has emerged as an effective strategy to reduce memory usage and computational costs by employing lower precision and bit-width representations. In this study, we systematically evaluate the impact of quantization on mathematical reasoning tasks. Our results demonstrate that aggressive quantization methods like AWQ and GPTQ introduce up to 32.39% accuracy degradation (average 11.31%) on Llama-3 models, particularly in numerical computation and reasoning planning. To address this, we introduce a multidimensional evaluation framework combining qualitative capability analysis and quantitative error assessment. We further develop targeted recovery strategies, showing that fine-tuning quantized models on only 545 task-specific examples for 3 minutes on 4 GPUs effectively restores reasoning capabilities to near full-precision levels. Additionally, our error assessment pipeline achieves 98.9% accuracy in diagnosing and localizing errors across 3,366 failure cases, providing actionable insights for mitigating quantization-induced degradation.

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Cited by 13 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

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    cs.LG 2026-07 conditional novelty 7.0

    TASA improves task-aware mixed-precision LLM quantization by searching calibration data mixtures via gradient-trace alignment and aggregating perplexity plus reasoning sensitivity signals, enabling 3.5-bit models to m...

  2. Quantizing Recursive Reasoning Models

    cs.LG 2026-06 conditional novelty 6.0

    Per-tensor 4-bit quantization of weight-tied recursive reasoners induces accumulating activation bias that kills accuracy; per-block scaling (MXInt4) restores it.

  3. BitNet Text Embeddings

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  4. BitNet Text Embeddings

    cs.CL 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    BITEMBED converts LLM backbones to ternary BitNet-style encoders, adapts them with contrastive pre-training and teacher distillation, and produces text embeddings at multiple precisions that perform comparably to full...

  5. Quantized Reasoning Models Think They Need to Think Longer, but They Do Not

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Post-training quantization increases overthinking errors in reasoning models; a logit penalty on curated overthinking markers reduces CoT length 12-23% without accuracy loss.

  6. LAQuant: A Simple Overhead-free Large Reasoning Model Quantization by Layer-wise Lookahead Loss

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    LAQuant improves long-decoding accuracy on quantized reasoning models like Qwen3-4B by 15pp on AIME25 via layer-wise lookahead loss, achieving 3.42x speedup over FP16.

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    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    PARSE trains a prompt-aware linear router on dense-model outputs to select dynamic SVD ranks, improving accuracy up to 10% at 0.6 compression ratio on LLaMA-7B while delivering 2.5x prefill and 2.4x decode speedups.

  8. FluxMoE: Decoupling Expert Residency for High-Performance MoE Serving

    cs.LG 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    FluxMoE decouples MoE expert weights from persistent GPU residency via on-demand paging, achieving up to 3x throughput gains over vLLM in memory-constrained inference without accuracy loss.

  9. The Quantization Trap: Breaking Linear Scaling Laws in Multi-Hop Reasoning

    cs.AI 2026-02 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Reducing precision from 16-bit to 8/4-bit in multi-hop reasoning creates a quantization trap that raises net energy consumption and degrades accuracy, breaking linear scaling laws.

  10. The Illusion of Equivalency: Statistical Characterization of Quantization Effects in LLMs

    cs.AI 2026-07 conditional novelty 5.0

    Quantized LLMs diverge from their base models at the decision level even when accuracy is preserved, with query and key attention projections showing the greatest structural distortion under low-bit compression.

  11. Mix-Quant: Quantized Prefilling, Precise Decoding for Agentic LLMs

    cs.CL 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Mix-Quant quantizes prefilling to NVFP4 and keeps BF16 for decoding in agentic LLMs, achieving up to 3x prefilling speedup while largely preserving task performance on long-context and agentic benchmarks.

  12. Quantized Large Language Models in Biomedical Natural Language Processing: Evaluation and Recommendation

    cs.CL 2025-09 conditional novelty 5.0

    Quantizing LLMs to 4 or 8 bits cuts GPU memory by up to 75% with generally small performance changes across eight biomedical NLP benchmarks.

  13. Towards EnergyGPT: A Large Language Model Specialized for the Energy Sector

    cs.CL 2025-09 unverdicted novelty 3.0

    Fine-tuned LLaMA 3.1-8B variants for the energy sector outperform the base model on domain QA benchmarks, with LoRA delivering similar gains at lower training cost.