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TurboQuant: A first-principles walkthrough

arkaung.github.io

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Re: TurboQuant: A first-principles walkthrough

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe we can run more powerful models locally. I thought the principal consequence of these KV cache optimisations was letting you run more simultaneous inferences on the same model with the same memory. It doesn’t let you store more model. In some sense that puts local LLM usage at a further disadvantage to inference done in a hyperscaler’s data center.

That's my hope as well as I tend to use low end GPUs (e.g. NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 @ 6GB). Been looking for an image generation model that can fit that vid card, for use with Ollama + GUI in Linux. No luck yet, since money's tight and jobs are tighter :(

An Arc B580 will just about fit Flux.2 Klein (At FP8). However, you can also easily get much larger GPUs on RunPod or Vast at $0.25/hr.

I would strongly recommend exploring that option, renting an RTX 5090 for an evening of image generation for a dollar or two is way more fun then trying to jam big models on little cards. Just take some time to create a reasonable, scripted, deployment workflow for when you create a fresh instance.

Re: TurboQuant: A first-principles walkthrough

#25
The public comments on Openreview now include explicit allegations that the TurboQuant paper knowingly misrepresented RaBitQ and understated RaBitQ’s results. The RaBitQ authors also report in a technical note that several of TurboQuant’s runtime and recall numbers do not reproduce from the released code under the paper’s stated setup. In the note, TurboQuant generally loses to RaBitQ: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.19528. If these public allegations hold up, then this is not just overhype or sloppy citation practice, but points to a distorted comparison and benchmark claims that do not survive reproduction.

Re: TurboQuant: A first-principles walkthrough

#26
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The note includes extensive experiments and reproduces many of the figures from the TurboQuant paper in our Section 5. Honestly, I think our case is pretty clear-cut as is. I am not sure what the overhead for those specific benchmarks would be, but we will look into it. (In any case, I want to emphasize that TurboQuant quantizer is a private case of EDEN)

with the amount of traction this has gotten... coming with a clear set of experiments even on arxiv paper would be of great help to showcase your improvements. And if they're easily reproducible, they could get integrated in the mainstream inference engines as well, as the main point here is compression with little degradation.

When you use TurboQuant, you are essentially using the EDEN quantizer under a different name applied to KV-cache.

Both EDEN and its 1-bit variant have been implemented in PyTorch, JAX, and TensorFlow across numerous open-source libraries and are used in various applications. I am currently writing a blog post that will document these in detail.

EDEN defines a scale parameter, S, for which we suggest specific optimal values for both biased and unbiased versions. As shown in the note I shared, these values lead to clear empirical improvements. Consequently, users who rely on the less optimal S value and the unbiasing method popularized by TurboQuant will generally see inferior results compared to those using EDEN with the optimal scale values suggested in our original papers.

Re: TurboQuant: A first-principles walkthrough

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe we can run more powerful models locally. I thought the principal consequence of these KV cache optimisations was letting you run more simultaneous inferences on the same model with the same memory. It doesn’t let you store more model. In some sense that puts local LLM usage at a further disadvantage to inference done in a hyperscaler’s data center.

That's my hope as well as I tend to use low end GPUs (e.g. NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 @ 6GB). Been looking for an image generation model that can fit that vid card, for use with Ollama + GUI in Linux. No luck yet, since money's tight and jobs are tighter :(

hey what's your Venmo?

Re: TurboQuant: A first-principles walkthrough

#28
post #6

TurboQuant is a restricted version of EDEN quantization (NeurIPS 21, ICML 22). It lacks the optimal scale derivations, which makes the TurboQuant variant considerably less accurate than those works. We show this thoroughly in a new note at https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.18555 . We were the first to introduce post-rotation distribution-aware quantization in 2021. This was later implemented in many fields, including federa…

I wonder how often this happens in practice - by "this", I mean industry/LLM world not noticing* some research until a bigger player repeats it with louder PR.

(*hopefully I didn't misunderstand the situation)

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