Target-Aware Calibration Data Selection for Preserving Uncertainty in Quantized Language Models

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21019v1
• Date: Fri, 21 Aug 2026 12:07:49 GMT
• Title: Target-Aware Calibration Data Selection for Preserving Uncertainty in Quantized Language Models
• Abstract summary: Quantization is widely used to deploy large language models, but its effect on uncertainty behavior is rarely treated as a primary objective.<n>We frame calibration-data selection for quantization as a target-dependent uncertainty-preservation problem.<n>We introduce Doubt-Preserving Quantization (DPQ), a lightweight pre-quantization recipe family that uses full-precision predictions.
• Score: 21.86864148430797
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Quantization is widely used to deploy large language models, but its effect on uncertainty behavior, such as confidence, margins, and abstention, is rarely treated as a primary objective. We frame calibration-data selection for quantization as a target-dependent uncertainty-preservation problem. Different deployments emphasize different regions of the input distribution, yet prior work mainly optimizes accuracy-oriented compression metrics or adjusts scores after quantization. We formalize this goal with distributional and boundary preservation risks, and provide a simple mixture-mismatch argument explaining why no single calibration recipe should be expected to fit all targets. We introduce Doubt-Preserving Quantization (DPQ), a lightweight pre-quantization recipe family that uses full-precision predictions to construct target-aligned calibration mixtures of high-doubt examples and generic anchors. Across 8 language models, 9 NLP benchmarks, and 22 comparison methods, the leading fixed recipe changes with the preservation target: DPQ-r75 leads on SQuAD2 answerability-boundary preservation, while milder or single-signal variants, including DPQ-r50, confidence-only, and entropy-only, better preserve broad multiple-choice QA behavior. These results show that calibration data should be selected for the specific full-precision score behavior a deployment needs to preserve, rather than treated as a fixed quantization detail.

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