

Activation-aware Weight Quantization (AWQ) doesn't quantize all the weights in a model, and instead, it preserves a small percentage of weights that are important for LLM performance. This significantly reduces quantization loss such that you can run models in 4-bit precision without experiencing any performance degradation.
There are several libraries for quantizing models with the AWQ algorithm, such as llm-awq, autoawq or optimum-intel. Transformers supports loading models quantized with the llm-awq and autoawq libraries. This guide will show you how to load models quantized with autoawq, but the process is similar for llm-awq quantized models.
Make sure you have autoawq installed: