Model quantification uses low bit-width values to represent the weight
matrices of models, which is a promising approach to reduce both storage and
computational overheads of deploying highly anticipated LLMs. However, existing
quantization methods suffer severe performance degradation when the bit-width
is extremely reduced, and thus focus on utilizing 4-bit or 8-bit values to
quantize models. This paper boldly quantizes the weight matrices of LLMs to
1-bit, paving the way for the extremely low bit-width deployment of LLMs. For
this target, we introduce a 1-bit quantization-aware training (QAT) framework
named OneBit, including a novel 1-bit parameter representation method to better
quantize LLMs as well as an effective parameter initialization method based on
matrix decomposition to improve the convergence speed of the QAT framework.
Sufficient experimental results indicate that OneBit achieves good performance
(at least 83% of the non-quantized performance) with robust training processes
when only using 1-bit weight matrices.

该研究使用 1 位量化来减少高度期望的低精度模型的存储和计算开销，并通过引入一种 1 位量化感知训练框架 OneBit 以及基于矩阵分解的参数初始化方法来实现良好的性能（至少达到非量化性能的 83%）。