When PTQ Calibration Helps or Hurts: Dose-Driven Collapse and Validation-Gated Abstention in Quantized Text Embedders

arXiv:2610.27397v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learned post-training quantization (PTQ) calibration fits quantizer parameters on a small calibration set, and for a text embedder the natural supervision is retrieval relevance. We ask two questions that are usually conflated: how far to calibrate, and whether to calibrate at all. Across three embedders (e5-base-v2, BGE-M3, EmbeddingGemma-300m) at 4-bit weight quantization, 161 calibration runs, the outcome of a fixed procedure ranges from a gain to catastrophic degradation, and the driver is the dose of the update, measured as the functional di

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