GlowQ: Group-Shared LOw-Rank Approximation for Quantized LLMs

TL;DR

GlowQ introduces a group-shared low-rank approximation technique for quantized large language models, significantly reducing latency and memory overhead while maintaining high accuracy.

Contribution

It proposes a novel group-shared low-rank correction method that caches a single shared factor per input group, improving efficiency over layer-specific corrections.

Findings

Reduces TTFB by 5.6% on average

Increases throughput by 9.6% on average

Maintains or improves model perplexity and accuracy

Abstract

Quantization techniques such as BitsAndBytes, AWQ, and GPTQ are widely used as a standard method in deploying large language models but often degrades accuracy when using low-bit representations, e.g., 4 bits. Low-rank correction methods (e.g., LQER, QERA, ASER) has been proposed to mitigate this issue, however, they restore all layers and insert error-correction modules into every decoder block, which increases latency and memory overhead. To address this limitation, we propose GlowQ, a group-shared low-rank approximation for quantized LLMs that caches a single shared right factor per input-sharing group and restores only the groups or layers that yield the highest accuracy benefit. GlowQ computes the high-precision projection once per input-sharing group and reuses it across its modules, reducing parameter and memory overhead, and retaining the expressivity of layer-specific corrections. We also propose a selective variant, GlowQ-S, that applies the cached shared module only where it provides the largest benefit. Compared with strong baselines, our approach reduces TTFB by (5.6%) and increases throughput by (9.6%) on average, while reducing perplexity on WikiText-2 by (0.17%) and increasing downstream accuracy by 0.42 percentage points. The selective model GlowQ-S further reduces latency, cutting TTFB by (23.4%) and increasing throughput by (37.4%), while maintaining accuracy within 0.2 percentage points on average. Code is available at https://github.com/ahnselim/GlowQ.