[D] TurboQuant author replies on OpenReview

I wanted to follow up to yesterday’s thread and see if anyone wanted to weigh in on it. This work is far outside of my niche, but it strikes me as an attempt to reframe the issue instead of addressing concerns head on. The part that it bugging me is this:

The true novelty of TurboQuant lies in our derivation of the exact distribution followed by the coordinates of rotated vectors, which we use to achieve optimal coordinate-wise quantization.

This is worded as if deriving the exact distribution was part of the novelty, but from what I can gather a clearer way to state this would be that they exploited well known distributional facts and believe what they did with it is novel.

OpenReview link for reference: https://openreview.net/forum?id=tO3ASKZlok

In response to recent commentary regarding our paper, “TurboQuant,” we provide the following technical clarifications to correct the record.

TurboQuant did not derive its core method from RaBitQ. Random rotation is a standard, ubiquitous technique in quantization literature, pre-dating the online appearance of RaBitQ, e.g. in established works like https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.13304, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.00456, or https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.11987. The true novelty of TurboQuant lies in our derivation of the exact distribution followed by the coordinates of rotated vectors, which we use to achieve optimal coordinate-wise quantization.

1. Correction on RaBitQ Optimality

While the optimality of RaBitQ can be deduced from its internal proofs, the paper’s main theorem implies that the distortion error bound scales as. Because a hidden constant factor within the exponent could scale the error exponentially, this formal statement did not explicitly guarantee the optimal bound. This led to our honest initial characterization of the method as suboptimal. However, after a careful investigation of their appendix, we found that a strictbound can indeed be drawn. Having now verified that this optimality is supported by their deeper proofs, we are updating the TurboQuant manuscript to credit their bounds accurately.

1. Materiality of Experimental Benchmarks

Runtime benchmarks are immaterial to our findings. TurboQuant’s primary contribution is focused on compression-quality tradeoff, not a specific speedup. The merit of our work rests on maintaining high model accuracy at extreme compression levels; even if the runtime comparison with RaBitQ was omitted entirely, the scientific impact and validity of the paper would remain mostly unchanged.

1. Observations on Timing

TurboQuant has been publicly available on arXiv since April 2025, and one of its authors was in communication with RaBitQ authors even prior to that, as RaBitQ authors have acknowledged. Despite having nearly a year to raise these technical points through academic channels, these concerns were only raised after TurboQuant received widespread attention.

We are updating our arXiv version with our suggested changes implemented.