Preprint Open access
When Lower Reconstruction Loss Hurts: Distributionally Robust Refinement for Low-Bit LLM Quantization
Weight-only post-training quantization (PTQ) relies heavily on reconstruction loss minimization to preserve model quality at low precision. We show that the weights favored by minimizing this loss need not yield better model performance on new tasks. In fact, we find that lower reconstruction loss can even degrade mode …