Scaling Post-Training Ternarisation to Qwen3-8B Capability Retention, Reproduction, Lossless Packing, and Packed Execution — Paper

Abstract

Ultra-low-bit language models promise reductions in storage and memory traffic, but a nominal "1.58-bit" label does not specify the deployed representation or its execution cost. We study a scale-up of an aggressive post-training conversion pipeline from Qwen3-4B to Qwen3-8B. The conversion uses KOTMS rotation, E2M-ATQ adaptive ternarisation, and GPTQ-style error compensation in a weight-only A16 configuration. We do not claim these algorithms as new. Our contribution is the end-to-end scale-up characterisation: an external reproduction gate, matched 4B/8B capability analysis, cross-corpus perplexity, effective-bit accounting, lossless lattice-aware packing, and direct packed execution. The 8B model reaches a three-corpus perplexity ratio of 1.361x, with WikiText-2, C4, and PTB ratios of 1.318x, 1.393x, and 1.371x. On eight zero-shot tasks at n = 500, mean accuracy is 64.6% versus 72.4% for FP16, corresponding to 78.5% chance-corrected retention and a 7.8-point absolute cost. The matched 4B run retains 69.6%, yielding an 8.9-point 8B advantage. The packed checkpoint is 8.24 GiB and preserves the recorded perplexity to measurement precision. Direct packed execution reaches 15.52 tokens/s in 7.35 GiB, while a preliminary packed GEMV remains slower than FP16 cuBLAS. The result is a validated scale-up baseline: model size improves robustness to aggressive post-training discretisation, actual serialisation is solved for the measured artefact, and direct execution is feasible, while broader seeds, calibration distributions, and kernel optimisation remain open.

Authors 3

Anirudh Malik, M Sparsh Mehra, Poojith Devan

Specification

Official page: arxiv.org/abs/2609.09240
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
Arxiv announce type: cross
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
arXiv id: 2609.09240
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
PDF: arxiv.org/pdf/2609.09240
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
Primary category: cs.LG
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
Published: 11 Sept 2026
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh

Each value shows its source, tier and observation time. Conflicting claims are kept side by side and flagged — never averaged. How AI Atlas records facts →

Provenance

Attributed facts

9

Source tiers

T19

Freshest observation

2 h ago

Conflicts

None

No models linked to this paper yet.

Authors: Anirudh Malik, M Sparsh Mehra, Poojith Devan

As of

Rewind the record: see this entity's attributes exactly as AI Atlas knew them on a given day.

Claim history · PDF

1 claims · 1 propertiesShow all properties

PDFpdf_url1

Claim history for PDF
Value	Valid from → to	Status	Source	Confidence	Extractor
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2609.09240	11 Sept 2026 21:03 UTC → current	current	arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1	high	deterministic

Claims are temporal and append-only: a new observation closes the previous claim (valid_to) instead of overwriting it. Conflicting claims from different sources are kept side by side and flagged — never averaged. Methodology →

11 Sept 2026
New paperPaperScaling Post-Training Ternarisation to Qwen3-8B Capability Retention, Reproduction, Lossless Packing, and Packed Execution
New paper: Scaling Post-Training Ternarisation to Qwen3-8B Capability Retention, Reproduction, Lossless Packing, and Packed Execution
arxiv
rss.arxiv.org

Full timeline →

Source documents
Source	Document	Type	Tier	Last observed	Snapshots
arXiv (Atom API + RSS)	rss.arxiv.org/rss/cs.AI	feed	T1· Official	2 min ago	1

Tier 1 = official/primary, 2 = quality secondary, 3 = community, 4 = unverified. Every snapshot is archived; see all sources and the methodology.