Post-Training Ternarization of Qwen3-4B Capability, Effective Bit Budget, Storage Compression, and Deployment

Abstract

arXiv:2609.01962v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Ultra-low-bit language models can reduce storage and memory bandwidth, but a nominal "1.58-bit" label does not fully describe the stored representation, retained capability, or runtime behavior. We study an end-to-end post-training conversion of Qwen, an instruction-tuned 4B-parameter model, using KOTMS rotation, E2M-ATQ ternarization, and GPTQ-style error compensation from TWLA. The experiment is weight-only: activations remain at 16-bit precision