Coverage-Based Calibration for Post-Training Quantization via Weighted Set Cover over Outlier Channels

TL;DR

This paper introduces COVERCAL, a calibration selection method for Post-Training Quantization that uses weighted outlier channel coverage to improve model compression quality, especially with limited calibration data.

Contribution

It formulates calibration sample selection as a weighted set cover problem over outlier channels, providing a principled and efficient approach with theoretical justification.

Findings

COVERCAL outperforms baselines across multiple models and evaluation metrics.

Significant improvements in MMLU and perplexity at small calibration budgets.

The method requires no GPU time at selection and is based on activation statistics.

Abstract

Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) compresses large language models to low bit-widths using a small calibration set, and its quality depends strongly on which samples are chosen. We identify a failure mode in which calibration samples fail to activate outlier channels, hidden dimensions with unusually large activations, causing the quantizer to underestimate their dynamic range and producing per-channel reconstruction errors that dominate layer-wise loss. Motivated by this observation, we argue that PTQ calibration quality is governed more by weighted outlier-channel coverage than by generic sample representativeness, and formulate calibration selection as a weighted set cover problem over outlier channels. The objective is monotone submodular, and the greedy algorithm, COVERCAL, operates on pre-computed activation statistics and requires no GPU time at selection. We further show that the weight choice is internally consistent: under a stylized clipping model, missed weighted coverage upper-bounds surrogate loss, justifying the weighted coverage objective as principled rather than purely empirical. Across LLaMA-2, LLaMA-3, and Mistral, under AWQ and GPTQ backends and five downstream evaluations, COVERCAL improves over random, max-perplexity, max-activation-variance, and stratified baselines, with the largest gains at small calibration budgets. At INT4 with 128 samples, COVERCAL improves MMLU by 1.2 to 1.5 points over random calibration and reduces perplexity degradation by 15 to 30\%; with 64 samples, it matches or exceeds random calibration at 256. The contribution is not a new PTQ backend but a formulation of calibration selection as weighted outlier coverage, with a simple, efficient algorithm and a surrogate-based justification.