Quaff: Quantized Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning under Outlier Spatial Stability Hypothesis

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2505.14742v2
• Date: Thu, 29 May 2025 22:04:36 GMT
• Title: Quaff: Quantized Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning under Outlier Spatial Stability Hypothesis
• Authors: Hong Huang, Dapeng Wu,
• Abstract summary: Quaff is a Quantized parameter-efficient fine-tuning framework for large language models.<n>It suppresses outliers exclusively invariant channels using lightweight operations.<n>It achieves a 1.73x latency reduction and 30% memory savings over full-precision fine-tuning.
• Score: 9.884521812433661
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have made exciting achievements across various domains, yet their deployment on resource-constrained personal devices remains hindered by the prohibitive computational and memory demands of task-specific fine-tuning. While quantization offers a pathway to efficiency, existing methods struggle to balance performance and overhead, either incurring high computational/memory costs or failing to address activation outliers, a critical bottleneck in quantized fine-tuning. To address these challenges, we propose the Outlier Spatial Stability Hypothesis (OSSH): During fine-tuning, certain activation outlier channels retain stable spatial positions across training iterations. Building on OSSH, we propose Quaff, a Quantized parameter-efficient fine-tuning framework for LLMs, optimizing low-precision activation representations through targeted momentum scaling. Quaff dynamically suppresses outliers exclusively in invariant channels using lightweight operations, eliminating full-precision weight storage and global rescaling while reducing quantization errors. Extensive experiments across ten benchmarks validate OSSH and demonstrate Quaff's efficacy. Specifically, on the GPQA reasoning benchmark, Quaff achieves a 1.73x latency reduction and 30% memory savings over full-precision fine-tuning while improving accuracy by 0.6% on the Phi-3 model, reconciling the triple trade-off between efficiency, performance, and deployability. By enabling consumer-grade GPU fine-tuning (e.g., RTX 2080 Super) without sacrificing model utility, Quaff democratizes personalized LLM deployment. The code is available at https://github.com/Little0o0/Quaff.git.

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