Why Gated DeltaNet Survives 4-Bit Quantization: NVFP4 W4A4 for the Recurrent Half of a Hybrid 27B LLM
This paper investigates why a specific neural network architecture, Gated DeltaNet, can survive 4-bit quantization. The researchers found that a new quantization technique, NVFP4, can be used to quantize the recurrent state of GDN without significant loss of performance, and they provide a mechanistic explanation for why this is the case.