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HFEPX · Eval paper review

STEPQuant: When and Where Errors Matter in Delta-Rule Recurrent State Quantization

Bingchen Yao, Haobo Xu, Haokun Lin, Yichen Wu +5 more

Published

Sep 29, 2026

Citations

0

Trust level

Low

Usefulness score

0/100 (Low)

Extraction confidence

35% (Low)

Derived from extracted protocol signals and abstract evidence.

Rater population

Not reported

Signals refreshed

Sep 29, 2026

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Tags

Automatic Metrics

Should you rely on this paper?

This paper is adjacent to HFEPX scope and is best used for background context, not as a primary protocol reference.

Use this as background context only. Do not make protocol decisions from this page alone.

Best use

Background context only

Use if you need

A secondary eval reference to pair with stronger protocol papers.

What to verify

Validate the evaluation procedure and quality controls in the full paper before operational use.

Main weakness

This paper looks adjacent to evaluation work, but not like a strong protocol reference.

Human feedback signal
Not explicit
Not explicit in abstract metadata
Evaluation signal
Detected
Eval setup described
Usefulness for eval research
0/100
Adjacent candidate

Treat as adjacent context, not a core eval-method reference.

If you are doing eval pipeline work, start here

Human Eval Papers LLM-as-Judge Papers Pairwise Preference Papers Tool-Use Evaluation Search

Abstract

Linear attention replaces growing KV caches with fixed-size recurrent states, yet these persistent states can become a substantial memory bottleneck under concurrent serving. Directly quantizing recurrent states to low precision often leads to severe accuracy degradation, as quantization errors propagate through successive state updates. We discover that the impact of these errors depends on two complementary dimensions: temporally, errors in long-lived memory can persist across many decoding steps; spatially, errors in different key rows affect model outputs differently, while state magnitudes vary substantially along both rows and columns. Motivated by these observations, we propose STEPQuant, a spatial-temporal post-training quantization framework for Delta-rule recurrent states. STEPQuant allocates precision according to error magnitude and memory lifetime, and jointly fits key-row and value-column scales based on state distributions and key-row impact on output error. Experiments on Qwen3.8-27B and Kimi-Linear-48B-A3B-Instruct across both long- and short-generation benchmarks show that STEPQuant closely matches FP32-state accuracy under a nominal 6-bit budget and outperforms uniform INT8 in its 4-bit configuration. Integrated into SGLang with optimized GPU kernels, 6-bit STEPQuant achieves over 5x recurrent-state compression and reduces total serving memory by up to 68.7%. Our code is available at https://github.com/Dreamer-Toby/STEPQuant.

What we could verify

These are the protocol signals we could actually recover from the available paper metadata. Use them to decide whether this paper is worth deeper reading.

Human Feedback Types

missing

None explicit

No explicit feedback protocol extracted.

"Linear attention replaces growing KV caches with fixed-size recurrent states, yet these persistent states can become a substantial memory bottleneck under concurrent serving."

Evaluation Modes

partial

Automatic Metrics

Includes extracted eval setup.

"Linear attention replaces growing KV caches with fixed-size recurrent states, yet these persistent states can become a substantial memory bottleneck under concurrent serving."

Quality Controls

missing

Not reported

No explicit QC controls found.

"Linear attention replaces growing KV caches with fixed-size recurrent states, yet these persistent states can become a substantial memory bottleneck under concurrent serving."

Benchmarks / Datasets

missing

Not extracted

No benchmark anchors detected.

"Linear attention replaces growing KV caches with fixed-size recurrent states, yet these persistent states can become a substantial memory bottleneck under concurrent serving."

Reported Metrics

partial

Accuracy, Precision

Useful for evaluation criteria comparison.

"Directly quantizing recurrent states to low precision often leads to severe accuracy degradation, as quantization errors propagate through successive state updates."

Benchmarks and datasets

No benchmark or dataset names were extracted from the available abstract.

Reported metrics

accuracyprecision
Human feedback details
Uses human feedback
No
Feedback types
None
Rater population
Not reported
Expertise required
Coding
Evaluation details
Evaluation modes
Automatic Metrics
Agentic eval
None
Quality controls
Not reported
Evidence quality
Low
Use this page as
Background context only

Research brief

Metadata summary

Linear attention replaces growing KV caches with fixed-size recurrent states, yet these persistent states can become a substantial memory bottleneck under concurrent serving.

Based on abstract + metadata only. Check the source paper before making high-confidence protocol decisions.

Key takeaways

  • Linear attention replaces growing KV caches with fixed-size recurrent states, yet these persistent states can become a substantial memory bottleneck under concurrent serving.
  • Directly quantizing recurrent states to low precision often leads to severe accuracy degradation, as quantization errors propagate through successive state updates.
  • We discover that the impact of these errors depends on two complementary dimensions: temporally, errors in long-lived memory can persist across many decoding steps; spatially, errors in different key rows affect model outputs differently, while state magnitudes vary substantially along both rows and columns.

Researcher actions

  • Compare this paper against nearby papers in the same arXiv category before using it for protocol decisions.
  • Validate inferred eval signals (Automatic metrics) against the full paper.
  • Use related-paper links to find stronger protocol-specific references.

Caveats

  • Generated from abstract + metadata only; no PDF parsing.
  • Signals below are heuristic and may miss details reported outside the abstract.

Recommended queries

Accuracy

Contribution summary

  • Directly quantizing recurrent states to low precision often leads to severe accuracy degradation, as quantization errors propagate through successive state updates.
  • Motivated by these observations, we propose STEPQuant, a spatial-temporal post-training quantization framework for Delta-rule recurrent states.
  • Experiments on Qwen3.8-27B and Kimi-Linear-48B-A3B-Instruct across both long- and short-generation benchmarks show that STEPQuant closely matches FP32-state accuracy under a nominal 6-bit budget and outperforms uniform INT8 in its 4-bit…

Why it matters for eval

  • Experiments on Qwen3.8-27B and Kimi-Linear-48B-A3B-Instruct across both long- and short-generation benchmarks show that STEPQuant closely matches FP32-state accuracy under a nominal 6-bit budget and outperforms uniform INT8 in its 4-bit…

Researcher checklist

  • Human feedback protocol is explicit

    No explicit human feedback protocol detected.

  • Evaluation mode is explicit

    Detected: Automatic Metrics

  • Quality control reporting appears

    No calibration/adjudication/IAA control explicitly detected.

  • Benchmark or dataset anchors are present

    No benchmark/dataset anchor extracted from abstract.

  • Metric reporting is present

    Detected: accuracy, precision