The paper reports the development of 2‑bit microkernels for CPUs and mixed‑precision 2‑bit kernels for Intel Xe2 GPUs, achieving near‑roofline performance. Integrated into LLM inference pipelines, these kernels deliver up to 7× speedup over 16‑bit inference on CPUs and 6.7× on GPUs, surpassing the current state‑of‑the‑art bitnet.cpp runtime by 2.2×. The work demonstrates that ultra‑low‑bit LLM models can be deployed efficiently, offering significant gains in latency, memory, throughput, and energy consumption.
By Evangelos Georganas, Dhiraj Kalamkar, Alexander Heinecke, Pradeep Dubey
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: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: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. 04050v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Existing quantization methods are fundamentally limited by rigid, integer-based bit-widths (e.
By Liulu He, XuanAng Liu, Juntao Liu, Taolue Feng, Ting Lu, Chunsheng Gan, Zhiyv Peng, Yuan Du, Huanrui Yang, Yijiang Liu, Li Du
Dynamic Expert Quantization (DynaExq) is a runtime-aware mixed-precision serving system designed for single‑GPU Mixture‑of‑Experts (MoE) inference under a hard high‑bandwidth memory (HBM) envelope. It treats the problem as an online, budget‑constrained precision allocation task, keeping the most frequently used experts at higher precision while relegating the rest to low‑precision fallbacks. By estimating expert hotness from router traces and asynchronously promoting or demoting experts, DynaExq maintains a fully materialized expert set during the forward pass, improving accuracy and throughput compared to static post‑training quantization and offloading/prefetch baselines.
whyItMatters":"DynaExq enables efficient deployment of large MoE models on memory‑limited GPUs by dynamically allocating precision based on runtime expert usage, thereby reducing memory footprint and latency while boosting accuracy and throughput."
By Kexin Chu, Dawei Xiang, Zixu Shen, Yiwei Yang, Zecheng Liu, Wei Zhang