Small language models (SLMs) are gaining attention for their lower computational and memory needs while maintaining strong performance. However, efficiently deploying SLMs on resource-constrained devices remains a significant challenge. Post-training quantization(PTQ) is a widely used compression technique that reduces memory usage and inference computation, yet existing methods face challenges in inefficient bit-width allocation and insufficient fine-grained quantization adjustments, leading to suboptimal performance, particularly at lower bit-widths. To address these challenges, we propose multi-level weight quantization (MLWQ), which facilitates the efficient deployment of SLMs. Our method enables more effective bit-width allocation by jointly considering inter-layer loss and intra-layer salience. Furthermore, we propose a fine-grained partitioning of intra-layer salience to support the tweaking of quantization parameters within each group. Experimental results indicate that MLWQ achieves competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art methods, providing an effective approach for the efficient deployment of SLMs while maintaining model accuracy.

Long context large language models (LLMs) pose significant challenges for efficient serving due to the large memory footprint and high access overhead of KV cache.Retrieval-based KV cache reduction methods can mitigate these challenges, typically by offloading the complete KV cache to CPU and retrieving necessary tokens on demand during inference.However, these methods still suffer from unsatisfactory accuracy degradation and extra retrieval overhead.To address these limitations, this paper proposes A²ATS, a novel retrieval-based KV cache reduction method.A²ATS aims to obtain an accurate approximation of attention scores by applying the vector quantization technique to key states, thereby enabling efficient and precise retrieval of the top-K tokens.First, we propose Windowed Rotary Position Embedding, which decouples the positional dependency from query and key states after position embedding.Then, we propose query-aware vector quantization that optimizes the objective of attention score approximation directly.Finally, we design the heterogeneous inference architecture for KV cache offloading, enabling long context serving with larger batch sizes.Experimental results demonstrate that A²ATS can achieve a lower performance degradation with similar or lower overhead compared to existing methods, thereby increasing long context serving throughput by up to 2.7 ×.

Deploying large language models (LLMs) on edge devices presents significant challenges due to the substantial computational overhead and memory requirements. Activation sparsification can mitigate these resource challenges by reducing the number of activated neurons during inference. Existing methods typically employ thresholding-based sparsification based on the statistics of activation tensors. However, they do not model the impact of activation sparsification on performance, resulting in suboptimal performance degradation. To address the limitations, this paper reformulates the activation sparsification problem to explicitly capture the relationship between activation sparsity and model performance. Then, this paper proposes CHESS, a general activation sparsification approach via CHannel-wise thrEsholding and Selective Sparsification. First, channel-wise thresholding assigns a unique threshold to each activation channel in the feed-forward network (FFN) layers. Then, selective sparsification involves applying thresholding-based activation sparsification to specific layers within the attention modules. Finally, we detail the implementation of sparse kernels to accelerate LLM inference. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed CHESS achieves lower performance degradation over eight downstream tasks while activating fewer parameters than existing methods, thus speeding up the LLM inference by up to 1.27x.