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.
arXiv:2602. 23334v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Neural network accelerators have been widely applied to edge devices for complex tasks like object tracking, image recognition, etc.
arXiv:2607. 27694v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Low-bit quantization is essential for efficient LLM inference, and both rotation and fine-grained group quantization have shown individual promise.
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.
arXiv:2608. 02700v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Analog compute-in-memory (CIM) enables energy-efficient neural network inference, but device variation and read noise can severely degrade low-bit quantized models.
arXiv:2605. 24391v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As the demand for deep learning grows, cost reduction through quantization has become essential for both training and inference.
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.
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.
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.
Squeeze10-LLM is a staged mixed‑precision post‑training quantization framework that reduces 16‑bit LLM weights to an average of 1.6 bits per weight by assigning 80% of weights to 1 bit and 20% to 4 bits. It introduces Post‑Binarization Activation Robustness (PBAR), a weight significance metric that considers activation impact, and Full Information Activation Supervision (FIAS), a strategy that preserves activation information to limit error propagation. Experiments on LLaMA and LLaMA2 demonstrate that Squeeze10‑LLM achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance for sub‑2‑bit weight‑only quantization, raising average accuracy from 43% to 56% on six zero‑shot classification tasks.
arXiv:2601. 07475v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The emergence of fine-grained numerical formats like NVFP4 presents new opportunities for efficient Large Language Model (LLM) inference.
arXiv:2602. 01027v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Mixed-precision quantization is a promising approach for compressing large language models under tight memory budgets.
arXiv:2606. 07618v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: NVFP4 is a recently introduced hardware-supported FP4 format that improves the fidelity of 4-bit quantization through fine-grained block scales.