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Catastrophic forgetting poses a fundamental challenge in continual learning, particularly when models are quantized for deployment efficiency. We systematically investigate the interplay between quantization precision (FP16, INT8, INT4) and…
Reasoning models excel at complex tasks such as coding and mathematics, yet their inference is often slow and token-inefficient. To improve the inference efficiency, post-training quantization (PTQ) usually comes with the cost of large…
This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of quantization techniques for optimizing Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically focusing on Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) and Quantization-Aware Training (QAT). Through empirical…
Quantization-aware training (QAT) is widely adopted to quantize language models by training full-precision weights using gradients from the quantized model. The main bottleneck is its slow convergence and early performance plateau,…
In the era of large-scale language models, the substantial parameter size poses significant challenges for deployment. Being a prevalent compression technique, quantization has emerged as the mainstream practice to tackle this issue, which…
Large language models (LLMs) excel at natural language tasks but face deployment challenges due to their growing size outpacing GPU memory advancements. Model quantization mitigates this issue by lowering weight and activation precision,…
Quantization-aware training (QAT) is an effective method to drastically reduce the memory footprint of LLMs while keeping performance degradation at an acceptable level. However, the optimal choice of quantization format and bit-width…
We introduce new methods for 1) accelerating and 2) stabilizing training for large language-vision models. 1) For acceleration, we introduce SwitchBack, a linear layer for int8 quantized training which provides a speed-up of 13-25% while…
In Large Language Models (LLMs), the number of parameters has grown exponentially in the past few years, e.g., from 1.5 billion parameters in GPT-2 to 175 billion in GPT-3 to possibly more than trillion in higher versions. This raises a…
The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) on edge devices is fundamentally constrained by the "Memory Wall" -- a hardware limitation where memory bandwidth, not compute, becomes the bottleneck. Recent 1.58-bit quantization techniques…
When quantizing weights and activations to increasingly narrower representations, the cost of additions begins to dominate that of multiplications in multiply-accumulate (MAC) units. Recent studies show that reducing addition costs via…
We present a novel sub-8-bit quantization-aware training (S8BQAT) scheme for 8-bit neural network accelerators. Our method is inspired from Lloyd-Max compression theory with practical adaptations for a feasible computational overhead during…
Quantization-aware training (QAT) is a common paradigm for network quantization, in which the training phase incorporates the simulation of the low-precision computation to optimize the quantization parameters in alignment with the task…
This paper presents the first study to explore the potential of parameter quantization for multimodal large language models to alleviate the significant resource constraint encountered during vision-language instruction tuning. We introduce…
Recent work has explored reduced numerical precision for parameters, activations, and gradients during neural network training as a way to reduce the computational cost of training (Na & Mukhopadhyay, 2016) (Courbariaux et al., 2014). We…
We introduce a quantization-aware training algorithm that guarantees avoiding numerical overflow when reducing the precision of accumulators during inference. We leverage weight normalization as a means of constraining parameters during…
Due to the high memory and computational costs associated with large language models (LLMs), model compression techniques such as quantization, which reduces inference costs, and parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods like Low-Rank…
Large language models (LLMs) require immense resources for training and inference. Quantization, a technique that reduces the precision of model parameters, offers a promising solution for improving LLM efficiency and sustainability. While…
The massive computational costs associated with large language model (LLM) pretraining have spurred great interest in reduced-precision floating-point representations to accelerate the process. As a result, the BrainFloat16 (BF16) precision…
Deploying deep neural networks on resource-constrained 6G edge devices demands aggressive compression with minimal accuracy loss. Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) has emerged as a leading compression approach; however, existing…