Silent Failures in Quantized LLM Reasoning: A Taxonomy-Based Analysis of Hollow Convergence and Failure Mode Shifts
TL;DR
It is shown that post-training quantization can silently alter how large language models reason even when task accuracy is preserved, and Hollow Convergence is established as a deployment-relevant failure mode that standard evaluation pipelines cannot catch.
Abstract
We show that post-training quantization can silently alter how large language models reason even when task accuracy is preserved. Using a six-category failure taxonomy validated by two independent human annotators (Cohen's $\kappa$ = 0.906), we classify 30,000 chain-of-thought outputs from five instruction-tuned LLMs (3B--14B parameters) across three quantization precisions (FP32, FP16, NF4) and four reasoning benchmarks. We find that while accuracy is robust across precisions (maximum 3.1 pp drop), Hollow Convergence (correct answers reached through incomplete or unverifiable reasoning) shows a significant size-dependent shift under NF4, dropping sharply for the two smallest models tested but remaining invariant for models at 12B parameters and above. This effect is also benchmark-specific: GSM8K is categorically immune while LogiQA and ARC-Challenge show the largest shifts. Furthermore, under NF4, Shortcut Collapse rises from 44% to 78% of wrong-answer failures in LLaMA 3.2-3B while Confidence Snowballing collapses from 15.8% to near zero, a qualitative shift invisible to accuracy metrics. Finally, we show Hollow Convergence cannot be reliably detected from surface-level text features (best F1 = 0.53), establishing it as a deployment-relevant failure mode that standard evaluation pipelines cannot catch.