ParoQuant

Pairwise Rotation Quantization for Efficient Reasoning LLM Inference

State-of-the-art INT4 quantization for LLMs. ParoQuant uses learned pairwise rotations to suppress weight outliers, closing the accuracy gap with FP16 while running at near-AWQ speed. Supports NVIDIA GPUs (vLLM, Transformers) and Apple Silicon (MLX).

Quick Start

Installation

# NVIDIA GPU (CUDA 12.9)
pip install "paroquant[vllm]"

# NVIDIA GPU (CUDA 13.0)
pip install "paroquant[vllm]" "vllm==0.17.1" \
  --extra-index-url https://wheels.vllm.ai/0.17.1/cu130 \
  --extra-index-url https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cu130

# Apple Silicon
pip install "paroquant[mlx]"

Pick a model from our Hugging Face collection:

export MODEL=z-lab/Qwen3.5-4B-PARO

Interactive Chat

python -m paroquant.cli.chat --model $MODEL

OpenAI-Compatible API Server

python -m paroquant.cli.serve --model $MODEL --port 8000

For vLLM, the arguments are passed to vLLM directly. See vLLM docs for more details.

For MLX, add --vlm if you wish to load the VLM components and use the model's multimodal features. For vLLM, VLM components are loaded by default and can be skipped with the server argument --language-model-only.

Docker (NVIDIA GPU)

Note

The following commands map the local cache directory to the container in order to persist kernel cache across runs. Remove -v ... to disable this behaviour.

# Interactive chat
docker run --pull=always --rm -it --gpus all --ipc=host \
  -v $HOME/.cache/paroquant:/root/.cache/paroquant \
  ghcr.io/z-lab/paroquant:chat --model $MODEL

# API server (port 8000)
docker run --pull=always --rm -it --gpus all --ipc=host -p 8000:8000 \
  -v $HOME/.cache/paroquant:/root/.cache/paroquant \
  ghcr.io/z-lab/paroquant:serve --model $MODEL

Models

All models are available on Hugging Face. Swap the model name in the commands above to try any of them.

Qwen3.5

Model	Checkpoint
Qwen3.5-0.8B	z-lab/Qwen3.5-0.8B-PARO
Qwen3.5-2B	z-lab/Qwen3.5-2B-PARO
Qwen3.5-4B	z-lab/Qwen3.5-4B-PARO
Qwen3.5-9B	z-lab/Qwen3.5-9B-PARO
Qwen3.5-27B	z-lab/Qwen3.5-27B-PARO

Qwen3

Model	Checkpoint
Qwen3-0.6B	z-lab/Qwen3-0.6B-PARO
Qwen3-1.7B	z-lab/Qwen3-1.7B-PARO
Qwen3-4B	z-lab/Qwen3-4B-PARO
Qwen3-8B	z-lab/Qwen3-8B-PARO
Qwen3-14B	z-lab/Qwen3-14B-PARO

Llama

Model	Checkpoint
Llama-2-7B	z-lab/Llama-2-7b-hf-PARO
Llama-3-8B	z-lab/Meta-Llama-3-8B-PARO
Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct	z-lab/Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct-PARO

Want a model that's not listed? Open an issue and let us know.

Reproduction

Note

The main branch of this repository is under active development, and reproducibility is not guaranteed. Please use the legacy branch to reproduce results from the paper.

Quantize Your Own Model

git clone https://github.com/z-lab/paroquant && cd paroquant
pip install -e ".[optim,eval]"

# 1. Optimize rotation parameters
experiments/optimize/4bit.sh Qwen/Qwen3-8B

# 2. Export to HF checkpoint (--mode real for INT4, --mode pseudo for FP16)
python -m paroquant.cli.convert \
  --model Qwen/Qwen3-8B \
  --result-dir output/Qwen3-8B \
  --output-path models/Qwen3-8B-PARO

Docker Images

Image	Purpose
ghcr.io/z-lab/paroquant:chat	Interactive chat
ghcr.io/z-lab/paroquant:chat-cu129	Interactive chat (CUDA 12.9)
ghcr.io/z-lab/paroquant:serve	OpenAI-compatible API server
ghcr.io/z-lab/paroquant:latest	Optimization & evaluation
ghcr.io/z-lab/paroquant:eval	Reasoning task evaluation

Citation

@inproceedings{liang2026paroquant,
  title     = {{ParoQuant: Pairwise Rotation Quantization for Efficient Reasoning LLM Inference}},
  author    = {Liang, Yesheng and Chen, Haisheng and Zhang, Zihan and Han, Song and Liu, Zhijian},
  booktitle = {International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)},
  year      = {2026}
}