TTQ: Activation-Aware Test-Time Quantization to Accelerate LLM Inference On The Fly

Abstract

To tackle the huge computational demand of large foundation models, activation-aware compression techniques without retraining have been introduced. However, since these methods highly rely on calibration data, domain shift issues may arise for unseen downstream tasks. We propose a test-time quantization (TTQ) framework which compresses large models on the fly at inference time to resolve this issue. With an efficient online calibration, instant activation-aware quantization can adapt every prompt regardless of the downstream tasks, yet achieving inference speedup. Several experiments demonstrate that TTQ can improve the quantization performance over state-of-the-art baselines.