Acceptability of Single-Stream Activation-Quantization Errors

Determine whether the normalized partial-dot errors introduced by the four single-stream activation-only signed-int4 approximation baselines are acceptable for deployment in BitNet b1.58 inference.

Background

The paper compares an exact two-stream signed-int4 mapping, which reconstructs ternary–int8 dot products exactly, with four single-stream activation-only baselines. The approximate baselines reduce CGLA execution time but introduce normalized partial-dot errors ranging from 0.0821 to 0.102 for the evaluated projection.

The evaluation reports only integer partial-dot error and does not measure perplexity, downstream task performance, or deployment-level quality. Consequently, the paper leaves unresolved whether the observed approximation errors are tolerable in practical BitNet b1.58 model deployment.