通过信息流评估层敏感度,实现高效高精度的混合精度量化。
InfoQ: Mixed-Precision Quantization via Global Information Flow
- 基于信息流变化衡量各层量化敏感度,不依赖局部梯度或搜索。
- 在14倍和10.66倍压缩下,ImageNet上准确率提升达1%。
- 无需训练即可完成比特分配,数据使用量仅为现有方法的1%。
混合精度量化(MPQ)对资源受限设备部署深度神经网络至关重要,但为每层寻找最优比特位宽构成复杂的组合优化问题。现有先进方法依赖计算成本高的搜索算法或局部敏感性启发式(如海塞矩阵),无法捕捉量化误差的级联全局影响。本文提出InfoQ,一种无需训练的新型MPQ框架。InfoQ通过单次前向传播量化各层并测量后续层互信息变化,评估其对全网信息流的影响,从而量化层敏感度。据此将比特分配建模为整数线性规划问题,在给定预算(如模型大小或BitOps)下最小化总敏感度。该方法无需重训练,搜索效率远超当前最优(如LIMPQ),数据使用量减少两个数量级;在14倍与10.66倍压缩率下,MobileNetV2和ResNet18于ImageNet上分别实现最高1%的准确率提升。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Mixed-precision quantization (MPQ) is crucial for deploying deep neural networks on resource-constrained devices, but finding the optimal bit-width for each layer represents a complex combinatorial optimization problem. Current state-of-the-art methods rely on computationally expensive search algorithms or local sensitivity heuristic proxies like the Hessian, which fail to capture the cascading global effects of quantization error. In this work, we argue that the quantization sensitivity of a layer should not be measured by its local properties, but by its impact on the information flow throughout the entire network. We introduce InfoQ, a novel framework for MPQ that is training-free in the bit-width search phase. InfoQ assesses layer sensitivity by quantizing each layer at different bit-widths and measuring, through a single forward pass, the resulting change in mutual information in the subsequent layers. This quantifies how much each layer quantization impacts the network information flow. The resulting scores are used to formulate bit-width allocation as an integer linear programming problem, which is solved efficiently to minimize total sensitivity under a given budget (e.g., model size or BitOps). Our retraining-free search phase provides a superior search-time/accuracy trade-off (using two orders of magnitude less data compared to state-of-the-art methods such as LIMPQ), while yielding up to a 1% accuracy improvement for MobileNetV2 and ResNet18 on ImageNet at high compression rates (14X and 10.66X).
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