针对视觉语言模型量化难题,提出基于注意力的高效压缩方法。
VLMQ: Token Saliency-Driven Post-Training Quantization for Vision-language Models
- 根据激活重要性筛选关键视觉与文本令牌,抑制冗余信息
- 2比特量化下在MME-RealWorld上提升16.45%性能
- 适用于0.5B~32B规模的视觉语言模型,尤其适合低比特部署
后训练量化(PTQ)是无需重训练即可压缩大模型、加速推理的有效手段。尽管在大语言模型中已广泛研究,但其在视觉语言模型(VLMs)中的应用仍不充分。本文发现VLM激活存在两个内在特征:1)视觉过表示,即视觉令牌过多且常冗余;2)模态差距,指文本与视觉令牌在潜在特征空间中分布差异明显。这两点显著恶化量化性能,但现有方法未予关注。为此,我们提出VLMQ——一种专为VLM设计的量化框架,通过选择性保留重要令牌、抑制冗余令牌实现优化。具体地,引入梯度驱动的重要度因子以捕捉令牌级重要性差异,并通过实证与理论分析验证其有效性;为保证效率,采用轻量级块级反向传播获取该因子;最后将优化目标重构为重要性感知形式,以保留关键激活信息。在8个基准上对0.5B~32B规模的VLM进行大量评估,结果表明该方法达到当前最优(SOTA)性能,尤其在低比特设置下表现突出。例如,在2比特量化下,于MME-RealWorld任务上取得16.45%的显著提升。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Post-training quantization (PTQ) has emerged as an effective technique for compressing large models and accelerating inference without retraining. While PTQ has been extensively studied in large language models (LLMs), its application to vision-language models (VLMs) remains underexplored. In this work, we identify two intrinsic characteristics of VLM activations: 1) visual over-representation, where vision tokens are excessive and often redundant, and 2) modality gap, which refers to the clear distribution gap between text and vision tokens in the latent feature space. Together, these two factors significantly deteriorate quantization performance but have been overlooked by existing PTQ methods. To address these challenges, we propose VLMQ, A VLM-tailored PTQ framework that selectively prioritizes salient tokens while suppressing redundant ones during quantization. In particular, we introduce a gradient-driven importance factor to capture the token-wise importance variance, the effectiveness of which is substantiated through both empirical and theoretical analysis. To ensure efficiency, we propose to use lightweight block-wise backpropagation for factor acquisition. Finally, we reformulate the optimization objective into an importance-aware form to preserve important activation information. Extensive evaluations on 8 benchmarks across 0.5B$\sim$32B VLMs demonstrate the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance of our VLMQ, particularly under low-bit settings. For example, it achieves a substantial \textbf{16.45\%} improvement on MME-RealWorld under 2-bit quantization.
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