arXiv AI

NANQ: Noise-Floor-Aware Mixed-Precision Non-Uniform Quantization for Analog Compute-in-Memory

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 Machine Learning
Sep 24

RAMP: Robust Adaptive Mixed-Precision Quantization for Edge CPU Vision Models

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
arXiv AI
2d ago

ShatterQuant: Breaking Uniform Precision with Block-Wise Mixed-Precision on a Systolic Transformer Hardware Accelerator

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
arXiv AI
Sep 2

HBQ: Hierarchical Scaling Block Quantization with Hardware-Efficiency-Aware Design for Accurate LLM Inference

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
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 2

WINDQuant: Weight-Informed Neural Decision-Making for Global Mixed-Precision LLM Quantization

arXiv:2605. 26660v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantization is an effective approach to reduce the memory footprint and inference cost of large language models (LLMs), yet maintaining performance in the ultra-low-bit regime remains challenging.

By Phong Nam Huu Nguyen, Khoi M. Le, Cong-Duy T Nguyen, Anh Tuan Luu, Thong Thanh Nguyen, Tho Quan
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

FAMPWQ: Fisher Information-based Adaptive Mixed Precision Weight Quantization for Effective LLM Inference

The paper introduces FAMPWQ, a Fisher information-based Adaptive Mixed Precision Weight Quantization method designed to improve Large Language Model inference on commodity GPUs. It uses a Fisher information metric to assess layer-wise sensitivity and a reinforcement learning-based bit-width allocator to adaptively assign precision per layer. Experiments across seven models and five benchmarks show significant gains in perplexity, accuracy, and LLM-as-a-judge performance compared to seven baseline approaches.

By Gongwei Lee, Ji Liu, Juncheng Jia, Ji Wu