arXiv:2606. 04115v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantizing large language models (LLMs) to low-precision floating-point representations is central to efficient deployment, yet applying a single bit-width uniformly across all layers is sub-optimal in terms of both performance and accuracy.
By Giuseppe Franco, Ian Colbert, Pablo Monteagudo-Lago, Felix Marty, Nicholas Fraser
arXiv:2606. 06527v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Energy-efficient edge inference requires reducing arithmetic cost, memory traffic, and hardware overhead.
By Ovishake Sen, Venkata Nithin Kamineni, Daniel Lobo, Swarup Bhunia, Rickard Ewetz, Baibhab Chatterjee
The paper introduces MiX, a micro‑inverted‑scaling format that replaces shared exponents with shared mantissas to avoid microscaling collapse in low‑bit vision‑language models. An adaptive dual‑format inference framework (MiX‑MX) maps this format to a custom accelerator, replacing multipliers with shifters. Experiments show 4.5‑bit MiX matches or outperforms NVFP4 accuracy while improving area efficiency by 25 % and delivering 2.3–4.5× speedup with 1.4–2.9× energy savings over the Focus accelerator.
By Yuan Liao, Jae-sun Seo
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.
By Qingcheng Zhu, Yangyang Ren, Linlin Yang, Yanjing Li, Sheng Xu, Haodong Zhu, Juan Zhang, Runqi Wang, Baochang Zhang
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:2607. 28418v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pruning is a promising approach for improving the efficiency of LLMs.
By Haozhe Hu, Hao Wu, Peiran Yin, Chao Han, Yunpu Ma, Xiaoyu Shen