Post-training quantizers select finite code changes using reconstruction proxies or local loss approximations, but the utility of a quantization move depends on the state through which it is executed. We identify two sources of this contextual dependence. First, the displacement of the move matters: evaluating the gradient at the move midpoint captures curvature accumulated along the move that a current-state linearization omits. Across frozen two-bit moves from Llama-3.2 models, midpoint evaluation predicts the direction of exact endpoint loss changes substantially more accurately than current-state gradients. Second, moves interact: exhaustive lattices of legal quantized states are well approximated by quadratic pseudo-Boolean functions, yet their small pairwise components can determine Pareto fronts and cause different evaluation functionals to prefer opposite directions. These effects explain failures of reconstruction-optimal code re-selection and additive composition. Reading each move at its own midpoint repairs the local selection step and improves downstream accuracy and held-out perplexity, while larger supports require evaluating exact endpoints from the state actually reached. Exact-endpoint beam search finds sparse changes that dominate much larger one-shot updates, and repricing the same moves after intervening changes produces widespread sign reversals. These results show that quantization utility is contextual at the granularity of a few moves: reliable construction must evaluate finite changes along their own paths and compose them from the evolving quantized state.
Low-bit quantization can achieve high recall on some vector representations and fail sharply on others, while average distortion and global rank correlation do not explain the difference. We study quantized vector search at the level of the comparisons consumed by ranking and graph-pruning algorithms. Our first result is a distribution-free decomposition: the probability that a comparison flips is bounded by the probability mass of exact margins near zero plus the tail probability of the calibrated residual. We then account for dependence between residuals that share a query or graph node, and derive covariance-aware second-moment identities and tail bounds under a joint MGF proxy. For a frozen candidate permutation, we prove a deterministic coupling theorem for Vamana neighbour selection: the approximate replay returns the exact neighbour list exactly when all candidate-level pruning actions agree on the frozen exact states. We connect these results to representation geometry through an exact Gaussian oracle, establish a strict correlation gain from a deterministic magnitude bit in an aligned bilinear model, and give a rare-contamination construction showing why marginal Gaussian diagnostics do not imply the required residual tails. When analytical assumptions are unavailable, a held-out block certificate bounds the selective failure risk of a frozen quantized rule. Across learned, classical, and synthetic embeddings, standardized exact margins predict held-out ranking and pruning flip rates substantially better than global rank correlation. The framework applies to coordinate binary codes, RaBitQ, Lucene BBQ, and product quantizers through a common decision interface.
Wen-Xuan Xiao, Xu Cao· 0 citations
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