arXiv:2410. 13056v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success across a wide range of language tasks, but their deployment on edge devices remains challenging due to the substantial memory requirements imposed by their large parameter sizes.
By Zihan Chen, Bike Xie, Jundong Li, Cong Shen
arXiv:2607. 23047v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mixed-precision quantization improves the accuracy of post-training quantization by allocating higher bitwidths to sensitive layers, but existing methods solve the allocation for a single fixed memory budget.
By Ashitabh Misra, Madhav Agrawal, Arham Jain, Tarek Abdelzaher
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
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
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: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