mlx-kquant

Bring K-quant precision to MLX on Apple Silicon: a C++/Metal extension for a stock mlx wheel that adds the K-quant superblock and per-block integer codecs as native MLX ops, plus a toolchain that quantizes a model into a K-quant MLX safetensors checkpoint and runs, LoRA-trains, and fuses it.

Two layers:

• Ops (C++/Metal) - a kq.* namespace (dequantize, quantized_matmul, gather_qmm, quantize) backed by Metal kernels compiled to a .metallib at build time (no runtime JIT). All ten K-quant/legacy codecs: q2_k, q3_k, q4_k, q5_k, q6_k and q4_0, q4_1, q5_0, q5_1, q8_0, plus nine IQ codecs (iq4_nl, iq4_xs, iq3_s, iq3_xxs, iq2_xxs, iq2_xs, iq2_s, iq1_s, iq1_m), plus the QAT structured-sparse ternary codec stq1_0 - all twenty decode, matmul (incl. tensor-core prefill), and encode (IQ and stq1_0 encode is CPU-only) - plus the native-fp wire codecs mxfp4, nvfp4 (decode, CPU NEON + Metal matmul, and the fused MoE family incl. biased gpt-oss experts; no encoder - GGUFs ship these tensors pre-quantized). On top of these four core ops the namespace also carries fused decode/prefill kernels (MoE GLU and router, attention, norm fusions) and a set of DeepSeek/GLM sparse-attention kernels - see docs/kernels.md.
• Tooling (Python) - mlx-kquant quantize / run / chat / lora / fuse (plus verify, inspect, calibrate-imatrix) and a loader that create and run K-quant checkpoints in MLX-native safetensors format.

Why

K-quants have roughly half the divergence vs. affine quants at the same bitrate (as measured by KLD).

Model	Budget	MLX affine	K-quant	Divergence cut
Qwen3.6-27B	4-bit	0.0577 @ 4.69 bpw	Q4_K_M 0.0208 @ 4.88 bpw	2.8×
Qwen3.6-27B	5-bit	0.0214 @ 5.68 bpw	Q5_K_M 0.0096 @ 5.73 bpw	2.2×
gemma-4-E2B	4-bit	1.2254 @ 5.76 bpw	Q4_K_M 0.6657 @ 5.77 bpw	1.8×
gemma-4-E2B	5-bit	0.4979 @ 6.67 bpw	Q5_K_XL 0.2316 @ 6.67 bpw	2.2×

mlx-kquant brings them to the MLX ecosystem with tuned Metal kernels. Quantize an MLX safetensors model to a uniform- or mixed-precision K-quant checkpoint, then load, generate, LoRA-train, and fuse it on a stock mlx wheel.

Install

macOS 26.2 (Tahoe) or later on Apple Silicon. Prebuilt wheels (CPython 3.10-3.14):

pip install mlx-kquant            # the K-quant ops + precompiled metallib
pip install "mlx-kquant[tools]"   # the CLI (quantize / run / chat / lora / fuse)

Either pulls the ABI-matched mlx==0.32.1 automatically.

From source (or to develop) needs the Metal toolchain (xcrun metal); the metallib compiles at install time, no runtime JIT:

git clone https://github.com/asher/mlx-kquant && cd mlx-kquant
pip install "mlx==0.32.1"         # pinned, ABI-matched stock wheel (pulls the Metal backend)
pip install -e ".[tools]"         # builds _ext + mlx_kquant.metallib; adds mlx-lm for the CLI

Linux (CPU-only) also builds, with no Metal toolchain. The ops run on their portable eval_cpu paths and no metallib is produced. (The tuned matmul/gather are Apple-Silicon-targeted: arm64 Linux picks up the NEON int8 GEMV when the CPU has dot-product, but the Accelerate GEMM is Apple-only, and x86_64 stays on the scalar/threaded path.) The base mlx wheel ships no backend on Linux, so install the CPU one explicitly:

pip install "mlx[cpu]==0.32.1"   # base frontend + libmlx CPU backend
pip install -e . --no-build-isolation

CPU is for portability and CI, not throughput. Running a full model forward on Linux also needs MLX_DISABLE_COMPILE=1, see Limitations.

Smoke-test the toolchain:

import mlx_kquant as kq
kq.codecs()          # -> ['q2_k', 'q3_k', ..., 'q8_0']
kq.metallib_loads()  # -> True  (the bundled metallib opened on the Metal device)

The extension links libmlx and its kernels #include MLX's steel-GEMM headers, so it is bound to an exact MLX ABI and header API. The pin is intentionally ==, never >=; moving to a newer mlx may require updating the bundled headers and recompiling. See Version pinning.

Quickstart

Quantize a checkpoint and run it, load it through mlx-lm, fine-tune it with LoRA, or build directly on the kq.* ops.

Create and run a checkpoint

The CLI (the [tools] extra adds mlx-lm) quantizes an HF / mlx-lm model into a K-quant MLX safetensors checkpoint and runs it:

pip install "mlx-kquant[tools]"
mlx-kquant quantize --model Qwen/Qwen3-0.6B --preset q4_k_m --mlx-path qwen3-q4
mlx-kquant run --model qwen3-q4 --prompt "Explain entropy in one sentence."
mlx-kquant chat --model qwen3-q4 --temp 0.7      # interactive REPL (mlx-lm chat)

run takes the usual sampling knobs (--temp, --top-p, --top-k, --min-p, --seed, --repetition-penalty, --presence-penalty, --frequency-penalty) and chat-template controls (--system-prompt, --no-chat-template, --chat-template-config for template kwargs such as '{"enable_thinking": false}'). The chat REPL has a line-editable prompt with persistent history (--no-history or in-chat /history off|on|clear to control it) and in-chat sampling control (/temp, /top-p, /top-k, /min-p, /max-tokens, and the three penalties; /sampling shows current values); /load <file> prefills the next prompt from a text file for editing; /clear resets the conversation and wipes the screen; Tab completes /commands and paths; Ctrl-C cancels the in-flight reply (at an idle prompt it exits, as does Ctrl-D). --max-kv-size bounds the KV cache for long sessions (a rotating window, set at start).

The result is a standard MLX checkpoint (config.json + sharded safetensors, weights as K-quant wire bytes). Load it in code with the bundled loader:

import mlx.core as mx
from mlx_kquant.loader import load

model, config = load("qwen3-q4")          # KQuant* layers swapped in, on a stock mlx-lm model
mx.eval(model(mx.array([[1, 2, 3]])))

mlx-kquant lora (train an adapter) and mlx-kquant fuse (merge it back) round out the toolchain - see LoRA fine-tuning. Run mlx-kquant --help for every subcommand.

Using with mlx-lm

In-process, a kquant checkpoint also loads through stock mlx-lm: one idempotent call installs the load shim, and from then on mlx_lm.load / mlx_lm.generate (and anything built on mlx_lm.utils.load_model, e.g. an eval harness or your own serving loop) open a kquant checkpoint transparently:

from mlx_kquant.mlx_lm_patch import patch_mlx_lm_load
patch_mlx_lm_load()                 # process-wide, idempotent; call once before mlx_lm.load

from mlx_lm import load, generate
model, tokenizer = load("qwen3-q4")
print(generate(model, tokenizer, "Explain entropy.", max_tokens=64))

This is the load-only shim for inference / eval / serving; patch_mlx_lm_lora() (below) adds the train/merge shims on top. The bundled mlx_kquant.loader.load (above) is the standalone path when you don't need the rest of mlx-lm.

LoRA fine-tuning

A kquant checkpoint is a frozen base you can adapt with LoRA. Attach an adapter for inference, train one (the matmul/gather ops define a gradient-through-the-base vjp, so the adapter is differentiable while the quantized weights stay frozen), and merge it back with mlx-kquant fuse (re-encode to kquant, or --dequantize to float). One call wires it into stock mlx-lm:

from mlx_kquant.mlx_lm_patch import patch_mlx_lm_lora
patch_mlx_lm_lora()   # before building LoRA layers / loading adapters; idempotent

See docs/lora.md for attach / train / merge workflows. (DoRA on a kquant base is not supported - use LoRA.)

Using K-quant ops directly

Under the toolchain, the four kq.* ops operate on raw K-quant wire bytes. K-quant scales live inside the packed bytes, so the scales argument is a vestigial placeholder (the API keeps it for shape symmetry with MLX's affine quant); kq.quantize returns one for you.

import mlx.core as mx
import mlx_kquant as kq

N, K = 256, 512                       # q4_k: K must be a multiple of 256
w = mx.random.normal((N, K))

# encode float -> K-quant wire bytes (CPU or Metal); optional imatrix steers the encoder
wq, scales = kq.quantize(w, "q4_k")           # wq: uint8 [N, bytes_per_row]

# dequantize back to float
deq = kq.dequantize(wq, scales, "q4_k")       # float16 [N, K]

# quantized matmul: x @ dequant(w).T   (transpose=True => w is [N, K])
x = mx.random.normal((8, K))
y = kq.quantized_matmul(x, wq, scales, "q4_k", transpose=True)   # [8, N]

Mixture-of-experts (gathered) matmul:

E, N, K = 128, 704, 2816
we = mx.random.normal((E, N, K))
weq, sc = kq.quantize(we, "q4_k")             # per-expert wire bytes
x = mx.random.normal((1, 8, K))               # (tokens, top_k, K)
idx = mx.array([[0, 5, 9, 17, 33, 41, 88, 120]], dtype=mx.uint32)
out = kq.gather_qmm(x, weq, sc, "q4_k", rhs_indices=idx, transpose=True)

Ready-made modules that store the wire bytes and dispatch the matching kq.* op ship in mlx_kquant.nn:

from mlx_kquant.nn import KQuantLinear, KQuantEmbedding, KQuantSwitchLinear

x = mx.random.normal((8, 512))   # a (tokens, in_dims) activation batch
lin = KQuantLinear(in_dims=512, out_dims=256, bias=False, codec="q4_k")
lin.weight = wq                  # the uint8 wire bytes from kq.quantize, above
lin.scales = scales              # [1] placeholder (scales live in the bytes)
y = lin(x)                       # kq.quantized_matmul under the hood

KQuantEmbedding (with a tied-as_linear), the gather_qmm-backed KQuantSwitchLinear for MoE experts, and KQuantMultiLinear (absorbed-MLA) are exported alongside it. To swap the quantizable leaves of a whole constructed mlx-lm model in one call, use mlx_kquant.nn.install_kquant_modules(model, {"<path>.weight": "q4_k", ...}).

The [tools] layer is itself a worked reference for wiring kq.* into the MLX ecosystem: the loader, encoder, layer modules, and the mlx-lm monkeypatch are all small and self-contained. See docs/integration.md if you're building on the ops.

Performance

The Metal kernels use a single-pass NAX matmul and matrix-contiguity handling for fused MoE expert weights. Measured on an M5 Max (128 GB):

Model	Codec	Decode (tok/s)	Prefill pp512 (tok/s)
gemma-4-26B-A4B-it (MoE)	q4_k_xl	~111	~2330
Qwen3.5-9B (dense)	q5_k_xl	~83	~2396

Transposed matmuls with a small row count (the speculative-decode verify regime) automatically route through a weight-read-amortizing verify_qmv kernel; KQ_DISABLE_VERIFY_QMV=1 forces the plain per-row qmv path (see Environment variables). Sorted MoE prefill batches (sorted_indices=True) route to a per-expert-segment GEMM on all GPUs instead of decomposing into per-row gathers: KQuantSwitchLinear takes the expert-major gather_qmm_seg walk (a NAX tile kernel where tensor units are available, steel simdgroup-mma elsewhere), and a bare gather_qmm call takes the fixed-tile gather_qmm_rhs kernels.

How it works

• Own ops. Four Primitive subclasses (KQuantDequantize, KQuantMatmul, KQuantGatherQMM, KQuantQuantize) and their op functions live entirely in the extension.
• Precompiled metallib on stock headers. The kq_* kernels are compiled against the stock wheel's steel-GEMM headers into mlx_kquant.metallib at build time; host dispatch resolves them through MLX's exported Device::get_kernel. No JIT, no steel host structs.
• Codec registry derives group_size/bits from the codec name, so callers pass only kquant_type.
• CPU and GPU execution. The decode ops (dequantize / quantized_matmul / gather_qmm) run on either stream for all twenty codecs; quantize (encode) covers the ten K-quant/legacy codecs on either stream and the nine IQ codecs plus stq1_0 CPU-only (ggml has no GPU quantizer for these), so the full quantize/decode pipeline (and the op tests) runs in CI without a GPU. The per-block dequantize is a scalar, bit-exact (per-codec, vs the gguf.quants reference quantizer) decoder. The CPU matmul and gather are tuned for Apple Silicon: a shared worker pool over output rows, NEON int8 dot-product GEMV for the small-M (decode) shape, and an Accelerate (AMX/SME) GEMM for the large-M (prefill) shape. The NEON path quantizes activations to int8 (lossy, as ggml does), so its matmul matches at tolerance, not bit-exactly; KQ_CPU_NEON=0 forces the scalar path for exact parity.

Environment variables

All optional; the defaults are right for normal use.

• KQ_CPU_THREADS - worker-pool size for the CPU ops (default: hardware concurrency; 1 runs them inline). KQ_CPU_SPIN_US sets a spin-before-park window for the pool (default 0 = park).

• KQ_CPU_NEON=0 - disable the arm64 NEON int8 GEMV kernels and run the scalar decode-then-dot matmul, which is bit-exact (the NEON path is tolerance-level; see How it works).

• KQ_DISABLE_VERIFY_QMV=1 - on Metal, force the plain per-row qmv path instead of the weight-read-amortizing verify_qmv kernel. An A/B debugging lever, not a tuning knob.

• KQ_DISABLE_GATHER_RHS_ALU=1 - on Metal without NAX, force sorted MoE prefill back to the per-row gather path instead of the segment-walking gather_qmm_rhs GEMM. A/B lever.

• KQ_GATHER_RHS_BM - pin the gather_qmm_rhs row tile height (16/32/64) instead of the rows-per-expert-adaptive choice. Retuning lever for other GPU generations.

• KQ_SWITCH_GEMM_MIN_ROWS - minimum routed rows before KQuantSwitchLinear takes the sorted per-expert GEMM arm on a prefill batch (default 512; 0 disables it and keeps the plain gather).

• KQ_GATHER_SEG_NAX=0 - on NAX GPUs, send KQuantSwitchLinear's sorted prefill arm to the fixed-tile gather_qmm_rhs_nax leaf instead of the expert-major gather_qmm_seg walk. Read per call. A/B lever.

• KQ_DISABLE_GATHER_SEG_NAX=1 - run gather_qmm_seg on its steel simdgroup-mma kernel even where the NAX tile kernel is available. Read once per process. A/B lever.

• KQ_MOE_DEDUP=0 - on Metal, run the fused MoE gathers at verify widths (2 to 8 rows per step) as one dispatch per (row, expert) pair instead of the default dedupe kernels, which dequantize an expert once per pair of rows that select it. Read per call. Outputs are bit-identical either way; KQ_MOE_HALF=1 keeps its own kernels at every width. A/B lever.

• KQ_MOE_HALF=1 - on Metal, run the iq2_xs, iq2_xxs and iq3_xxs fused MoE decode gathers on the half-dot kernels (half grid tables, half-staged activations, half chunk dots with a float sum per chunk; shared-expert slots stay on the float path). Read per call. Default off: the outputs differ from the float kernels at half rounding level. A/B lever.

• KQ_SDPA_IDX_NAX=0 - run sdpa_fa_indexed on its simdgroup kernel even where the NAX tile kernel is available. Read once per process. The simdgroup kernel matches sdpa_fa_verify over the gathered rows bit for bit; the NAX kernel differs at output rounding level. A/B lever.

The model-specific kernels carry their own tuning levers, documented alongside each kernel in docs/kernels.md.

Quant recipes

A preset is a named mixed-precision recipe. It classifies each tensor by role (attention q/k/v/o, embeddings, lm_head, MoE routed vs shared experts, the FFN down-projection) and maps each role to a codec - spending bits where they move the output most and staying frugal on the bulk feed-forward weights, to beat a uniform quant at the same byte budget.

mlx-kquant quantize --model <src> --preset q4_k_m   --mlx-path out   # a mixed recipe
mlx-kquant quantize --model <src> --kquant-type q6_k --mlx-path out  # one codec, every tensor

Naming follows the ggml convention: the family (q4_k, q5_k, ...) sets the baseline codec and the suffix sets how much extra precision the recipe spends:

• _s / _m / _xl - small / medium / extra: increasing bumps on the sensitive tensors (the value and output projections, the down-projection on a subset of layers, the linear-attention projections).
• _moe - expert-aware: routed experts at the baseline, shared experts a step above.
• bare q6_k / q8 - uniform (every tensor at one codec), equivalent to passing --kquant-type.

mlx-kquant quantize --list-presets prints the full, authoritative mapping for every preset; it is generated from the recipe tables, so it never drifts from what the encoder actually does. The recipes are informed by our analysis of the mixed-precision quants that Unsloth and bartowski publish on Hugging Face, together with llama.cpp's own per-layer "use more bits" schedule.

Codec reference

Codec	Block	Bits	Bytes/block	Notes
q2_k	256	2	84	K-quant superblock
q3_k	256	3	110	K-quant superblock
q4_k	256	4	144	K-quant superblock
q5_k	256	5	176	K-quant superblock
q6_k	256	6	210	K-quant superblock
q4_0	32	4	18	block scale
q4_1	32	4	20	block scale + min
q5_0	32	5	22	block scale
q5_1	32	5	24	block scale + min
q8_0	32	8	34	block scale
iq4_nl	32	4	18	non-linear LUT
iq4_xs	256	4	136	LUT superblock
iq3_s	256	3	110	grid + signs
iq3_xxs	256	3	98	grid + gas words
iq2_xxs	256	2	66	grid + scale/sign words
iq2_xs	256	2	74	grid + scales
iq2_s	256	2	82	grid + qh + signs
iq1_s	256	1	50	grid + delta
iq1_m	256	1	56	grid + delta, scattered scale
stq1_0	256	1	42	ternary codebook, one forced zero per 4 (QAT)
mxfp4	32	4	17	e8m0 scale, E2M1 values (decode-only)
nvfp4	64	4	36	4x ue4m3-scaled 16-value groups (decode-only)

Version pinning

Pinned to mlx==0.32.1. The kernels include MLX's steel headers and the extension links libmlx, binding it to that release's ABI and header API. To move to a newer MLX: update the bundled headers under metal/mlx/backend/metal/kernels/ for that wheel, rebuild, and re-run the test suite.

Tests

python -m pytest tests/

Requirements

• macOS 26.2 (Tahoe) or later on Apple Silicon (M-series). Building from source needs the Metal toolchain (xcrun metal).
• Linux (x86_64 or aarch64) is supported CPU-only. Build against mlx[cpu]==0.32.1, no Metal toolchain required. See Install and Limitations.
• Python >= 3.10 (the pinned mlx==0.32.1 ships no cp39 wheel).
• mlx==0.32.1 exactly - the kernels include MLX's steel headers and the extension links libmlx, so the ABI is version-locked (see Version pinning).

Limitations

• GPU path is Apple-Silicon Metal only. No ROCm or CUDA support. Every op also has a CPU path (stream=mx.cpu) — decode for all twenty codecs, encode for all twenty (IQ and stq1_0 encode is CPU-only) — so the extension still builds and runs without Metal (see How it works and Install).
• Linux model forwards need MLX_DISABLE_COMPILE=1. Stock MLX's CPU compile JIT generates C++ that redeclares GCC's built-in _Float32/_Float64/_Float128 types, which g++ rejects, so any model forward through MLX's compile path fails on Linux+GCC. Disabling the JIT runs those graphs eagerly with identical numerics. This is an upstream MLX-on-Linux limitation independent of mlx-kquant - the kq.* ops have their own eval_cpu and never touch the JIT.
• LoRA, not DoRA. LoRA adapters train, attach, and fuse on a kquant base (see docs/lora.md), DoRA is not yet supported. fuse re-encodes to kquant or, with --dequantize, to float; both modes run on CPU or Metal.

License

MIT - see LICENSE.

Acknowledgements

mlx-kquant builds on the following projects; their license texts ship in the wheel under mlx_kquant/licenses/:

• llama.cpp / ggml - the K-quant, IQ, and legacy block codec formats and the quantization / dequantization algorithms that encode and decode them (including the IQ codebook / grid tables, transcribed verbatim) are derived from ggml's reference implementation.
• gguf-tools - used to implement a zero-copy GGUF loader for downstream projects, statically linked into built wheels.
• MLX - the extension links libmlx, the kernels compile against MLX's bundled headers, and parts of the Metal kernels are adapted from MLX's quantized and steel-GEMM kernels.
• omlx (Apache-2.0) - the DeepSeek-V4-Flash DSA kernels (dsa_sparse_attention, dsa_indexer_scores, dsa_topk_indices) are ported, with modifications, from omlx's glm_moe_dsa custom kernels (Copyright OpenAI / Apple Inc., per file).
• beellama.cpp (MIT) - the KVarN KV-cache quantizer (kvarn_quantize / kvarn_dequant, kvarn_rotate) and the record layout the *_kvarn attention kernels read are ported to Metal from its kvarn implementation, and the parity fixtures are generated from its CPU reference. The method is Huawei's KVarN (Muller et al., arXiv:2606.03458; reference vLLM implementation at huawei-csl/KVarN, Apache-2.0), taken by way of beellama's port; no code from the vLLM reference is used.