What exactly is quantization aware training?

First time hearing it.

I also heard about the gemma 4 qat quants and if any one of them is good for 4gb vram and 16gb ram. I can run gemma 4 26b moe iq2 nl at 8.5 to 9 tps(kv cache unquantized on gpu) with 9 layers offloaded to gpu