Abstract:Conditional generative models have emerged as powerful tools for sampling from target conditional distributions, driving substantial advances across a wide range of scientific and applied domains. As these models proliferate, practitioners often face multiple plausible generators whose performance can vary with the task, data, or input condition. We propose an optimal model averaging framework for conditional generative models, allowing candidate generators to be combined even when they are accessible only through conditional samples without tractable densities. Specifically, we use a sample-based maximum mean discrepancy between conditional distributions, which first leads to a static model averaging method, StaticMA, assigning fixed weights to different candidates. In addition, we develop MoEMA (mixture-of-experts model averaging), an input-adaptive method that parameterizes covariate-dependent weights through a softmax neural-network gate. We establish in-sample and out-of-sample asymptotic optimality for the proposed methods, together with consistency of the estimated adaptive weight function under regularity conditions. The framework applies directly to Euclidean responses and extends to unstructured data by combining our formulation with fixed representation maps. Across a broad set of simulations and real-data studies spanning tabular, image, and text modalities, MoEMA generally improves over competing baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed methods.
Abstract:Post-training quantization (PTQ) is an effective approach for deploying large language models (LLMs) under memory and latency constraints. Most existing PTQ methods determine quantization parameters by minimizing a layer-wise reconstruction error on a predetermined calibration dataset, usually optimized via either scale search or Gram-based methods. However, from the perspective of generalization risk, existing calibration objectives of PTQ based only on empirical reconstruction error on limited or unrepresentative calibration data could move the quantized weights away from the original weights. This may cause the generalization risk to diverge, potentially degrading downstream performance. To address this issue, we propose \emph{Saliency-Aware Regularized Quantization Calibration} (SARQC) a unified framework that augments the standard PTQ objective with a saliency-aware regularization term. This term encourages quantized weights to stay close to the original weights during calibration, leading to improved generalization during inference. SARQC integrates seamlessly into existing PTQ pipelines, enhancing both scale search and Gram-based methods under a unified formulation. Extensive experiments on dense and Mixture-of-Experts LLMs demonstrate consistent improvements in perplexity and zero-shot accuracy, without additional computational overhead during inference.