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arXiv:2602.07899

Rethinking Practical and Efficient Quantization Calibration for Vision-Language Models

Zhenhao Shang, Haizhao Jing, Guoting Wei, Haokui Zhang, Rong Xiao, Jianqing Gao, Peng Wang

Published Feb 8, 2026• 0 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Post-training quantization (PTQ) is a primary approach for deploying large language models without fine-tuning, and the quantized performance is often strongly affected by the calibration in PTQ. By contrast, in vision-language models (VLMs), substantial differences between visual and text tokens in their activation distributions and sensitivities to quantization error pose significant challenges for effective calibration during PTQ. In this work, we rethink what PTQ calibration should align with in VLMs and propose the Token-level Importance-aware Layer-wise Quantization framework (TLQ). Guided by gradient information, we design a token-level importance integration mechanism for quantization error, and use it to construct a token-level calibration set, enabling a more fine-grained calibration strategy. Furthermore, TLQ introduces a multi-GPU, quantization-exposed layer-wise calibration scheme. This scheme keeps the layer-wise calibration procedure consistent with the true quantized inference path and distributes the complex layer-wise calibration workload across multiple RTX3090 GPUs, thereby reducing reliance on the large memory of A100 GPUs. TLQ is evaluated across two models, three model scales, and two quantization settings, consistently achieving performance improvements across all settings, indicating its strong quantization stability. The code will be released publicly.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2602.07899

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Post-training quantization (PTQ) is a primary approach for deploying large language models without fine-tuning, and the quantized performance is often strongly affected by the calibration in PTQ. By contrast, in vision-language models (VLMs), substantial differences between visual and text tokens in their activation distributions and sensitivities to quantization error pose significant challenges for effective calibration during PTQ. In this work, we rethink what PTQ calibration should align with in VLMs and propose the Token-level Importance-aware Layer-wise Quantization framework (TLQ). Guided by gradient information, we design a token-level importance integration mechanism for quantization error, and use it to construct a token-level calibration set, enabling a more fine-grained calibration strategy. Furthermore, TLQ introduces a multi-GPU, quantization-exposed layer-wise calibration scheme. This scheme keeps the layer-wise calibration procedure consistent with the true quantized inference path and distributes the complex layer-wise calibration workload across multiple RTX3090 GPUs, thereby reducing reliance on the large memory of A100 GPUs. TLQ is evaluated across two models, three model scales, and two quantization settings, consistently achieving performance improvements across all settings, indicating its strong quantization stability. The code will be released publicly.
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Strong reasoning capabilities can now be achieved by large-scale reinforcement learning (RL) without any supervised fine-tuning. Although post-training quantization (PTQ) and quantization-aware training (QAT) are well studied in the context of fine-tuning, how quantization impacts RL in large reasoning models (LRMs) remains an open question. To answer this question, we conducted systematic experiments and discovered a significant gap in reasoning performance on mathematical benchmarks between post-RL quantized models and their quantization-aware RL optimized counterparts. Our findings suggest that quantization-aware RL training negatively impacted the learning process, whereas PTQ and QLoRA led to greater performance.
As quantum computing moves from the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era toward early fault-tolerant quantum computing (EFTQC), quantum-enhanced AI is shifting from a conceptual idea to experimental research. Quantum components are expected to extend the capabilities of existing AI systems, yet it remains unclear how such components will help within large multimodal models. In this study, we try to answer that question for vision-language models (VLMs) using classically simulated quantum layers. With LLaVA-OneVision as the backbone, we evaluate 4- and 8-qubit basic-ring and strongly entangling circuits at four insertion and four replacement locations. Insertion adds quantum layers to the classical model, while replacement substitutes them for classical components. Using the same setup, we compare performance and computational cost between classical and quantum-classical hybrid models. On the Visual Spatial Reasoning dataset, inserting a quantum layer after the visual projector reaches 80.7% development accuracy, 2.28 percentage-points above classical full fine-tuning. Replacing the final decoder feed-forward sublayer retains 79.22% accuracy with 13.07 million fewer trainable parameters. Quantum insertion can thus improve accuracy, and selective replacement can reduce parameters. These benefits depend strongly on where the quantum layer is inserted or which classical component it replaces: earlier replacements lower accuracy, and fewer parameters do not reliably shorten training or reduce computation. To assess potential security benefits, we evaluated the robustness of quantum-classical hybrid models under six attack settings. Overall, our study maps where quantum layers help and hurt within VLMs, offering a starting point for hybrid VLM design; whether these gains generalize remains open. The code is available at https://github.com/TITANS-Lab-Artifacts/QuantumVLM.