The Rescue Effect: Spatio-Semantic Early Exit Bypasses Quantization Collapse in CLIP

arXiv:2605.26415v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deploying Vision-Language Models on resource-constrained hardware typically requires INT8 quantization, but in joint-embedding architectures such as CLIP this introduces a failure mode distinct from quantized CNN classifiers: activation noise accumulated across transformer blocks perturbs the direction of the multimodal embedding, eroding the cosine alignment on which zero-shot retrieval depends. We characterize this as Quantization-Induced Representation Collapse (QIRC) and quantify it on INT8 CLIP ViT-B/32, where the layer-wise noise-to-signa

Source: arXiv cs.AI — read the full report at the original publisher.

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