ShatterQuant is a hardware-software co-designed framework that enables mixed-precision quantization within individual tensors by assigning different bit-widths to blocks of a weight projection. It couples precision granularity with processing element configuration, allowing each precision to determine an effective block height. The framework includes a hardware-aware post-training method based on block-level standard deviation and weight sensitivity, a ShatterQuant Transformer Accelerator supporting 1/2/4/8-bit weight precision, precision-dependent PE configuration, block rescaling, and integrated softmax and piecewise-linear nonlinearities, and an evaluation showing 1.5 TOPS, 760 GOPS/$mm^2$ area efficiency, and 2.8 TOPS/W energy efficiency on a TSMC 16nm PDK implementation.
By Mikolaj Walczak, Edward Humes, Chao Fang, Marian Verhelst, Tinoosh Mohsenin
The paper introduces REQAP, a reliability‑aware quantized weight packing technique for systolic‑array DNN accelerators. It uses a sensitivity‑driven mixed‑precision quantization to assign layer‑wise bit‑widths, a deterministic register‑level packing strategy for SIMD‑within‑a‑register execution, and selective bit‑level protection that replicates critical MSBs into unused register space. Experiments on AlexNet, VGG‑11, and ResNet‑18 show up to 62% memory reduction, 56% fewer MAC operations, and improved accuracy resilience under fault injection compared to baseline and fully protected models.
By Mahdi Taheri, Samira Nazari, Mubassher Ansari, Ali Azarpeyvand, Mohsen Afsharchi, Maksim Jenihhin, Christian Herglotz
arXiv:2608. 06916v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantized Neural Networks~(QNN) with low-bitwidth data have proven promising in efficient storage and computation on edge devices.
By Zijun Jiang, Yangdi Lyu
arXiv:2602. 22352v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: With the continuous growth of neural network scales, low-precision quantization is widely used in edge accelerators.
By Yuhao Liu, Salim Ullah, Akash Kumar
arXiv:2606. 27884v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mixed-precision computation has been introduced in deep neural networks (DNNs) as an effective approach to reduce latency, energy consumption, and memory footprint.
By Leandro Fiorin, Marco Ronzani, Cristina Silvano
arXiv:2607. 15328v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Complex algorithms such as deep neural networks are increasingly being deployed on embedded, resource constrained platforms.
By Taisa Kushner (Galois Inc), Ryan McCleeary (Galois Inc), Martin Brain (City St George University of London)
The paper presents a PyTorch-based framework for designing and optimizing binarized neural networks, incorporating freezing and pruning mechanisms. It introduces a novel pruning method that uses a global weighting scheme to assess parameter importance across abstraction levels, achieving a 70% pruning rate on VGG11 without sacrificing accuracy—outperforming existing binarized pruning results of 41%. The framework facilitates rapid, reproducible evaluation and prototyping of state‑of‑the‑art binarized network techniques.
By Roan Rubiales, Jean Pierre David
FAME is an FPGA-based platform that evaluates approximate multipliers directly in hardware, eliminating slow CPU/GPU LUT emulation and reducing evaluation time for DNN inference. It also introduces a pattern-guided retraining method that uses multiplier-specific patterns to recover accuracy losses. Experiments on ResNet‑18 and MobileNetV2 over ImageNet show up to 3.47× faster multiplier evaluation and a 65.5% accuracy improvement over prior retraining approaches.
By Rappy Saha, Nima Amirafshar, Jude Haris, Nima Taherinejad, Jos\'e Cano
arXiv:2311. 17815v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Given their increasing size and complexity, the need for efficient execution of deep neural networks has become increasingly pressing in the design of heterogeneous High-Performance Computing (HPC) and edge platforms, leading to a wide variety of proposals for specialized deep learning architectures and hardware accelerators.
By Serena Curzel, Fabrizio Ferrandi, Leandro Fiorin, Daniele Ielmini, Cristina Silvano, Francesco Conti, Luca Bompani, Luca Benini, Enrico Calore, Sebastiano Fabio Schifano, Cristian Zambelli, Maurizio Palesi, Giuseppe Ascia, Enrico Russo, Valeria Cardellini, Salvatore Filippone, Francesco Lo Presti, Stefania Perri
arXiv:2606. 31938v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deploying Vision Transformer (ViT) models on edge platforms remains challenging due to their high computational demands and the architectural heterogeneity of modern hybrid ViT models, which incorporate both fully connected and convolutional layers.
By Hubert Dymarkowski, Xingjian Fu, Rappy Saha, Jude Haris, Jos\'e Cano
HBQ: Hierarchical Scaling Block Quantization with Hardware‑Efficiency‑Aware Design for Accurate LLM Inference proposes a new block‑quantization scheme that uses large blocks and low‑overhead significand scaling to balance hardware efficiency and accuracy. The authors demonstrate that larger blocks improve efficiency by amortizing dequantization and accumulation costs, while their SIG scaling compensates for the resulting accuracy loss. Experiments on a 28 nm ASIC accelerator show that HBQ achieves up to 4.6× higher area/energy efficiency than state‑of‑the‑art weight‑only quantization, with 1.5–3.0× speedup and 1.6–3.3× system energy reduction over existing BQ methods.
By Chun-Ting Chen, Dongmin Han, Hangyeol Mun, Jake Hyun, Arnab Raha, Amit Agarwal, Mark Anders, Mohamed Abdelfattah, Jae-sun Seo
The paper introduces RAMP, a method for robust adaptive mixed‑precision quantization of vision models on edge CPUs. It evaluates 13 sensitivity metrics across four neural networks, finding that Jensen‑Shannon Divergence consistently identifies layers that can be safely quantized. Using K‑Means clustering on these metrics, RAMP achieves near‑lossless accuracy with an average 1.81× speed‑up, while cautioning against excluding low‑speed‑up layers that can fragment the computational graph.
By David Poblaci\'on-Criado, Dario Garcia-Gasulla, Eduardo Quinones