Breaking the 1.58-bit Barrier for Ternary LLMs
The prevailing deployment format packs five ternary weights into one byte (five-trit packing), and due to the power-of-two group sizes used in practice this rounds up to $1.625$ bits per weight. This effective storage bit-width treats the three symbols $\{-1,0,+1\}$ as equiprobable. We measure the actual symbol distribution of 29 ternary LLM models and find that zeros account for up to $51.5\%$ of all weights.
- ▪The prevailing deployment format packs five ternary weights into one byte (five-trit packing), and due to the power-of-two group sizes used in practice this rounds up to $1.625$ bits per weight.
- ▪This effective storage bit-width treats the three symbols $\{-1,0,+1\}$ as equiprobable.
- ▪We measure the actual symbol distribution of 29 ternary LLM models and find that zeros account for up to $51.5\%$ of all weights.
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| Original publisher | arXiv.org |
| Canonical URL | https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16338 |
| Publication time | Wed, 16 Sep 2026 20:59:24 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-16T21:33:41.651Z |
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Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence arXiv:2609.16338 (cs) [Submitted on 14 Sep 2026] Title:Breaking the 1.58-bit Barrier for Ternary LLMs Authors:Evangelos Georganas, Alexander Heinecke, Pradeep Dubey View a PDF of the paper titled Breaking the 1.58-bit Barrier for Ternary LLMs, by Evangelos Georganas and 2 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Ternary Large Language Models (LLM) store every weight as one of three symbols $\{-1,0,+1\}$, so the cost of a ternary model is conventionally referenced to the information-theoretic $\log_2 3 \approx 1.585$ bits per weight. The prevailing deployment format packs five ternary weights into one byte (five-trit packing), and due to the power-of-two group sizes used in practice this rounds up to $1.625$ bits per weight.
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