SpecQuant: Spectral Decomposition and Adaptive Truncation for Ultra-Low-Bit LLMs Quantization

Abstract

The emergence of accurate open large language models (LLMs) has sparked a push for advanced quantization techniques to enable efficient deployment on end-user devices. In this paper, we revisit the challenge of extreme LLM compression---targeting ultra-low-bit quantization for both activations and weights---from a Fourier frequency domain perspective. We propose SpecQuant, a two-stage framework that tackles activation outliers and cross-channel variance. In the first stage, activation outliers are smoothed and transferred into the weight matrix to simplify downstream quantization. In the second stage, we apply channel-wise low-frequency Fourier truncation to suppress high-frequency components while preserving essential signal energy, improving quantization robustness. Our method builds on the principle that most of the weight energy is concentrated in low-frequency components, which can be retained with minimal impact on model accuracy. To enable runtime adaptability, we introduce a lightweight truncation module during inference that adjusts truncation thresholds based on channel characteristics. On LLaMA-3 8B, SpecQuant achieves 4-bit quantization for both weights and activations, narrowing the zero-shot accuracy gap to only 1.5% compared to full precision, while delivering 2× faster inference and 3× lower memory usage.