Revisiting Error Feedback for Model Quantization

Wai-Yiu Keung, Chi Cui, Wing-Kin Ma, Jesús Cid-Sueiro, Hei Victor Cheng

We study causal error-feedback coefficients as design variables for model quantization. Modeling instantaneous quantization errors as independent, zero-mean variables with a common fixed variance, we formulated a metric-dependent trace problem for designing feedback coefficients. The formulation resembles fixed-order GPTQ/LDLQ feedback and supports Jacobian-aware designs that account for downstream error propagation. For a positive-definite metric $\boldsymbol{H}$, we prove that the joint rotation-feedback trace minimum is $n\det(\boldsymbol{H})^{1/n}$ and present an attaining pair using the geometric mean decomposition. Experiments on synthetic networks, trained MLPs, and language models show benefits from downstream-sensitive feedback, but also reveal that trace optimality need not improve finite-level performance. Small QAT experiments further illustrate direct loss-driven feedback tuning with fixed or trainable network weights.