Qift: Shift-Friendly No-Zero W2 Post-Training Quantization for Rotated W2A4/KV4 LLM Inference

Abstract

Two-bit weight quantization is attractive for memory-efficient LLM inference, but the standard W2 level set {-2,-1,0,+1} often collapses under aggressive W2A4/KV4 settings. We study the scalar level-set geometry of two-bit weights in a Hadamard-rotated quantization pipeline. Conventional asymmetric W2 substantially improves over the standard level set, indicating that W2A4 failure is not only a bit-width problem but also a reconstruction-level problem. Across all 224 linear modules in each of LLaMA-2-7B and LLaMA-3.1-8B, pretrained weights are already nearly zero-centered, while Hadamard rotation primarily Gaussianizes their standardized shape: excess kurtosis and Q-Q error drop by orders of magnitude. Based on this approximate zero-centered Gaussian-like source model, we propose Qift, a fixed no-zero W2 level set for rotated W2A4/KV4 inference. The main level set is {+/-0.5, +/-1.5}, equivalently {+/-1, +/-3} under a half-scale reparameterization; a power-of-two variant uses {+/-1, +/-4} for sign-and-shift decoded weight application. Qift redesigns the fixed two-bit code-to-level mapping and is training-free, learned-codebook-free, group-grid-free, and zero-point-free, retaining the standard per-channel scale. A scale-invariant ratio analysis identifies an effective inner/outer centroid ratio range of 0.25 to 0.33, explaining why mirror no-zero (MNZ), Lloyd, NF2, and PoT-MNZ perform well while {+/-1, +/-2} does not. On both models, the no-zero level sets consistently improve pure W2A4 perplexity, L-layer mixed W2/W4 perplexity, downstream accuracy, and GPTQ residual behavior over the standard W2 level set. At L=16 mixed precision, they substantially narrow the gap to W3A4 while keeping half of the transformer layers at two-bit precision, giving a simple, source-aware, and deployment-friendly alternative to more complex learned W2 codebooks.