Living systematic review

LLM quantization

Compressing LLM weights and activations to low bit-widths (4-bit and below) for cheaper inference, while preserving quality — outlier handling, rotation, and post-training quantization.

97 papers151 critique receipts1,451 benchmark resultsupdated Jun 18, 2026

Most-superseded baselines

Ranked by how many distinct papers critique or beat each method — the standard baselines newer work routinely measures against.

  1. 1
    GPTQ

    GPTQ: Accurate Post-Training Quantization for Generative Pre-trained Transformers

    13 critique · 28 beaten on benchmarks

  2. 2
    AWQin GPTQ

    AWQ: Activation-aware Weight Quantization for LLM Compression and Acceleration

    9 critique · 15 beaten on benchmarks

  3. 3
    SmoothQuant

    SmoothQuant: Accurate and Efficient Post-Training Quantization for Large Language Models

    13 critique · 9 beaten on benchmarks

  4. 4
    QuaRotin SmoothQuant

    QuaRot: Outlier-Free 4-Bit Inference in Rotated LLMs

    7 critique · 12 beaten on benchmarks

  5. 5
    OmniQuantin GPTQ

    OmniQuant: Omnidirectionally Calibrated Quantization for Large Language Models

    2 critique · 14 beaten on benchmarks

  6. 6
    RTN

    2 critique · 10 beaten on benchmarks

  7. 7
    SpinQuantin SmoothQuant

    3 critique · 8 beaten on benchmarks

  8. 8
    AQLMin GPTQ

    3 critique · 5 beaten on benchmarks

  9. 9
    QuIPin GPTQ

    QuIP: 2-Bit Quantization of Large Language Models With Guarantees

    3 critique · 4 beaten on benchmarks

  10. 10
    SVDQuantin SmoothQuant

    SVDQuant: Absorbing Outliers by Low-Rank Components for 4-Bit Diffusion Models

    3 critique · 4 beaten on benchmarks

  11. 11
    PB-LLMin GPTQ

    PB-LLM: Partially Binarized Large Language Models

    4 critique · 3 beaten on benchmarks

  12. 12
    FlatQuantin SmoothQuant

    FlatQuant: Flatness Matters for LLM Quantization

    2 critique · 4 beaten on benchmarks

The competition

Methods that fight on the same benchmarks cluster into distinct sub-problems.

GPTQ26 methods

GPTQ · AWQ · OmniQuant · AQLM · QuIP · PB-LLM

SmoothQuant33 methods

SmoothQuant · QuaRot · SpinQuant · SVDQuant · FlatQuant · AffineQuant

RTN30 methods

RTN · BitNet · QLoRA · EfficientQAT · QTIP · ARB-LLM

GPTAQ12 methods

GPTAQ · MBQ · DuQuant · MASQuant · QSLAW · QSVD

PACT10 methods

PACT · LSQ · N2UQ · GPLQ · LSQ+ · DiffQ

QDrop8 methods

QDrop · PD-Quant · FIMA-Q · AdaLog · EasyQuant · MGRQ

FlexRound6 methods

FlexRound · LLM.int8() · ZeroQuant · SplitQuantV2 · LRQ · AdpQ

AMQ8 methods

AMQ · SFMP · HAQ · HAWQ · MixLLM · BitStack

AQ-SGD3 methods

AQ-SGD · TAH-Quant (Tile-wise Adaptive Hadamard Quantization) · AMAQ

QServe3 methods

QServe · APEX4 · LiquidGEMM

The frontier

Recent methods not yet superseded in the knowledge base.