Recti-Q: Feature-Space Rectification for Out-of-Distribution-Robust Quantized Perception in Edge Robotics
The paper identifies a robustness gap introduced by post-training quantization (PTQ) in robotic perception models deployed on edge devices. While PTQ maintains in-distribution accuracy, it reduces reliability under distribution shifts. The authors propose Recti-Q, a lightweight feature-space rectification method that uses a frozen quantized backbone and a small LoRA adapter, achieving significant robustness recovery with minimal overhead.
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[Submitted on 20 Jul 2026]
Title:Recti-Q: Feature-Space Rectification for Out-of-Distribution-Robust Quantized Perception in Edge Robotics
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Abstract:Robotic perception pipelines increasingly rely on large vision backbones deployed on SWaP-constrained edge platforms, making post-training quantization (PTQ) attractive for real-time inference. However, while PTQ often preserves clean in-distribution accuracy, we show that it can substantially degrade reliability under deployment-relevant distribution shifts (e.g., sensor noise, severe weather, and novel operating environments), creating a Quantization-Induced Robustness Gap. Across foundational vision benchmarks (ImageNet-C and PACS), 4-bit PTQ models exhibit pronounced robustness degradation despite negligible ID accuracy loss. To address this, we propose Recti-Q, a lightweight feature-space rectification framework that freezes the quantized backbone and trains a small classifier-head LoRA adapter using only source data. Recti-Q is architecture-agnostic across CNNs and Transformers, supports efficient teacher-free training, and recovers a significant portion of the lost robustness, in some cases matching or exceeding FP32 performance. At less than 1% parameter overhead (as small as 6 KB), Recti-Q preserves over 99% of PTQ memory savings, adds negligible compute, and enables low-bandwidth Over-The-Air (OTA) resilience patching for deployed robotic fleets operating in unpredictable physical environments.
Comments: Accepted at the 2026 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2026)
Subjects:
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Machine Learning (cs.LG); Robotics (cs.RO)
Cite as: arXiv:2607.18540 [cs.CV]
(or arXiv:2607.18540v1 [cs.CV] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.18540
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Hamidreza Yaghoubi Araghi [view email] [v1] Mon, 20 Jul 2026 22:14:04 UTC (951 KB)
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