@inproceedings{silva-etal-2026-lost,
    title = "Lost in Quantization: Activation Outliers Explain Language-Specific {FP}8 Sensitivity in Llama-3",
    author = "Silva, Guilherme  and
      Silva, Pedro  and
      Peixoto, Matheus  and
      Moreira, Gladston  and
      Luz, Eduardo",
    editor = "Souza, Marlo  and
      de-Dios-Flores, Iria  and
      Santos, Diana  and
      Freitas, Larissa  and
      Souza, Jackson Wilke da Cruz  and
      Ribeiro, Eug{\'e}nio",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computational Processing of {P}ortuguese ({PROPOR} 2026) - Vol. 1",
    month = apr,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Salvador, Brazil",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-dnd/2026.propor-1.108/",
    pages = "1044--1048",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-387-6",
    abstract = "Quantization is key for efficient LLM inference, but its language-specific effects are understudied. We compare INT8 and FP8 (E4M3) quantization for Meta-Llama-3-8B on English and Brazilian Portuguese (PT-BR). INT8 with outlier handling preserves perplexity in both languages, while naive FP8 casting degrades English far more than PT-BR (+18{\%} vs. +3.9{\%}). Activation analysis shows rarer, larger English spikes ($>35$) that are more prone to saturation under unscaled E4M3, whereas PT-BR activations are more concentrated. Our FP8 results reflect a naive casting stress test (no calibration/scaling), not an optimized FP8 recipe."
}