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BaKron: Efficient Quantization with Kronecker-Factored Hessians

Research Efficiency & Systems

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TL;DR - BaKron is an efficient solver for GPTQ-style adaptive-rounding quantization that uses two-sided Kronecker-factored Hessian approximations, capturing output-coordinate correlations that one-sided activation-based methods miss — at the same cubic cost as GPTQ. It matters because it makes richer curvature information practical for post-training quantization of large models.

  • Builds on the two-sided adaptive-rounding formulation of BoA and YAQA, which is normally prohibitive because applying GPTQ directly in the vectorized weight domain costs $O(m^2n^2)$.
  • Combines anti-diagonal parallelism with a recursive divide-and-conquer construction: for an $m\times n$ weight matrix, $O(m+n)$ sequential steps and total work reduced to $O(mn(m+n))$, matching GPTQ's cubic scaling.
  • Modular with respect to both the base quantizer and the Hessian estimator, so it can be paired with a range of Hessian approximations.
  • Paper reports practical benchmarks, an efficient technique for computing the relevant Hessians, and experimental evaluation; specific accuracy/speed numbers are not given in the abstract.

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BaKron: Efficient Quantization with Kronecker-Factored Hessians

arXiv cs.LG Johann Birnick, Rayan Saab 2026-08-06 arXiv:2608.06291
Public signals Semantic Scholar citations 0 · Semantic Scholar influential citations 0
Providers: Hugging Face · N/A OpenAlex · N/A Publisher · N/A Semantic Scholar · Citations 0 · Influential citations 0 X · N/A Fetched 2026-08-13 10:11:53.674882 UTC

TL;DR - BaKron is an efficient solver for GPTQ-style adaptive-rounding quantization that uses two-sided Kronecker-factored Hessian approximations, capturing output-coordinate correlations that one-sided activation-based methods miss — at the same cubic cost as GPTQ. It matters because it makes richer curvature information practical for post-training quantization of large models.

  • Builds on the two-sided adaptive-rounding formulation of BoA and YAQA, which is normally prohibitive because applying GPTQ directly in the vectorized weight domain costs $O(m^2n^2)$.
  • Combines anti-diagonal parallelism with a recursive divide-and-conquer construction: for an $m\times n$ weight matrix, $O(m+n)$ sequential steps and total work reduced to $O(mn(m+n))$, matching GPTQ's cubic scaling.
  • Modular with respect to both the base quantizer and the Hessian estimator, so it can be paired with a range of Hessian approximations.
  • Paper reports practical benchmarks, an efficient technique for computing the relevant Hessians, and experimental evaluation; specific accuracy/speed numbers are not given in the abstract.
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