ArXiv TLDR

QuantClaw: Precision Where It Matters for OpenClaw

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2604.22577

Manyi Zhang, Ji-Fu Li, Zhongao Sun, Xiaohao Liu, Zhenhua Dong + 3 more

cs.AIcs.CL

TLDR

QuantClaw dynamically routes precision for autonomous agents, reducing costs and latency while maintaining performance by adapting to task-specific needs.

Key contributions

  • Analyzes quantization sensitivity across OpenClaw workflows, revealing task-dependent precision requirements.
  • Proposes QuantClaw, a plug-and-play plugin for dynamic precision routing in autonomous agent systems.
  • Routes lightweight tasks to lower precision and demanding tasks to higher precision, optimizing resource use.
  • Achieves up to 21.4% cost savings and 15.7% latency reduction on GLM-5 without performance loss.

Why it matters

High costs and latency hinder the widespread adoption of autonomous agent systems. QuantClaw offers a practical solution by intelligently managing computational precision, making these systems more efficient and accessible. This approach could significantly lower development and operational expenses for real-world AI agents.

Original Abstract

Autonomous agent systems such as OpenClaw introduce significant efficiency challenges due to long-context inputs and multi-turn reasoning. This results in prohibitively high computational and monetary costs in real-world development. While quantization is a standard approach for reducing cost and latency, its impact on agent performance in realistic scenarios remains unclear. In this work, we analyze quantization sensitivity across diverse complex workflows over OpenClaw, and show that precision requirements are highly task-dependent. Based on this observation, we propose QuantClaw, a plug-and-play precision routing plugin that dynamically assigns precision according to task characteristics. QuantClaw routes lightweight tasks to lower-cost configurations while preserving higher precision for demanding workloads, saving cost and accelerating inference without increasing user complexity. Experiments show that our QuantClaw maintains or improves task performance while reducing both latency and computational cost. Across a range of agent tasks, it achieves up to 21.4% cost savings and 15.7% latency reduction on GLM-5 (FP8 baseline). These results highlight the benefit of treating precision as a dynamic resource in agent systems.

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