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Quantizing the activation, weight, and gradient to 4-bit is promising to accelerate neural network training. However, existing 4-bit training methods require custom numerical formats which are not supported by contemporary hardware. In this…
One of the challenges of quantizing a large language model (LLM) is the presence of outliers. Outliers often make uniform quantization schemes less effective, particularly in extreme cases such as 4-bit quantization. We introduce KurTail, a…
Quantizing the weights of a neural network has two steps: (1) Finding a good low bit-complexity representation for weights (which we call the quantization grid) and (2) Rounding the original weights to values in the quantization grid. In…
Post-training quantization (PTQ) of large language models (LLMs) holds the promise in reducing the prohibitive computational cost at inference time. Quantization of all weight, activation and key-value (KV) cache tensors to 4-bit without…
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have garnered widespread attention due to their ability to understand multimodal input. However, their large parameter sizes and substantial computational demands severely hinder their practical…
Outliers in weights and activations pose a key challenge for fixed-point quantization of neural networks. While they can be addressed by fine-tuning, this is not practical for ML service providers (e.g., Google or Microsoft) who often…
Mixed-precision quantization is a popular approach for compressing deep neural networks (DNNs). However, it is challenging to scale the performance efficiently with mixed-precision DNNs given the current FPGA architecture and conventional…
Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in various tasks. However their huge model size and the consequent demand for computational and memory resources also pose challenges to model deployment. Currently, 4-bit…
As large language models (LLMs) grow in size and deployment scale, quantization has become an essential technique for reducing memory footprint and improving inference efficiency. However, existing quantization toolkits often lack…
Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing tasks. However, their practical deployment is hindered by their immense memory and computation requirements. Although recent post-training quantization (PTQ)…
The increasing size and complexity of large language models (LLMs) have raised significant challenges in deployment efficiency, particularly under resource constraints. Post-training quantization (PTQ) has emerged as a practical solution by…
We present SmoothRot, a novel post-training quantization technique to enhance the efficiency of 4-bit quantization in Large Language Models (LLMs). SmoothRot addresses the critical challenge of massive activation outliers, by integrating…
Model quantization reduces the bit-width of weights and activations, improving memory efficiency and inference speed in diffusion models. However, achieving 4-bit quantization remains challenging. Existing methods, primarily based on…
Large DNNs with mixed-precision quantization can achieve ultra-high compression while retaining high classification performance. However, because of the challenges in finding an accurate metric that can guide the optimization process, these…
Quantization is a powerful tool to improve large language model (LLM) inference efficiency by utilizing more energy-efficient low-precision datapaths and reducing memory footprint. However, accurately quantizing LLM weights and activations…
Low-bit floating-point (FP) formats, such as FP8, provide significant acceleration and memory savings in model training thanks to native hardware support on modern GPUs and NPUs. However, we analyze that FP8 quantization offers speedup…
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are essential for performing advanced tasks on edge or mobile devices, yet their deployment is often hindered by severe resource constraints, including limited memory, energy, and computational power. While…
This paper introduces HiFloat4 (HiF4), a block floating-point data format tailored for deep learning. Each HiF4 unit packs 64 4-bit elements with 32 bits of shared scaling metadata, averaging 4.5 bits per value. The metadata specifies a…
The deployment of deep neural networks on edge devices is a challenging task due to the increasing complexity of state-of-the-art models, requiring efforts to reduce model size and inference latency. Recent studies explore models operating…
Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide range of real-world tasks, but their inference cost remains prohibitively high due to the quadratic complexity of attention and the memory…