提出新量化训练方法,让极低比特模型性能接近全精度。
MEC-Quant: Maximum Entropy Coding for Extremely Low Bit Quantization-Aware Training
- 用最大熵编码优化表示结构,减少量化偏差。
- 首次实现8比特以下激活值的量化训练,性能媲美全精度模型。
- 适合追求极致压缩与高效推理的部署场景。
量化感知训练(QAT)致力于生成高效神经网络,但当前方法在极低比特设置下仍显著劣于全精度(FP)模型。本文指出,极低比特量化不可避免引入表示偏差,为此提出最大熵编码量化(MEC-Quant),通过显式优化表示结构以降低偏差,提升对未见样本的泛化能力。为实现端到端可训练,采用有损数据编码中的最小编码长度作为熵的可计算替代,并基于专家混合(MOE)设计可扩展重构,支持快速计算并处理权值或激活值的长尾分布。在多个视觉任务上验证有效性,首次实现x-bit激活值的量化训练,且性能可媲美甚至超越全精度模型。无需额外技巧,建立新的QAT基准。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) has driven much attention to produce efficient neural networks. Current QAT still obtains inferior performances compared with the Full Precision (FP) counterpart. In this work, we argue that quantization inevitably introduce biases into the learned representation, especially under the extremely low-bit setting. To cope with this issue, we propose Maximum Entropy Coding Quantization (MEC-Quant), a more principled objective that explicitly optimizes on the structure of the representation, so that the learned representation is less biased and thus generalizes better to unseen in-distribution samples. To make the objective end-to-end trainable, we propose to leverage the minimal coding length in lossy data coding as a computationally tractable surrogate for the entropy, and further derive a scalable reformulation of the objective based on Mixture Of Experts (MOE) that not only allows fast computation but also handles the long-tailed distribution for weights or activation values. Extensive experiments on various tasks on computer vision tasks prove its superiority. With MEC-Qaunt, the limit of QAT is pushed to the x-bit activation for the first time and the accuracy of MEC-Quant is comparable to or even surpass the FP counterpart. Without bells and whistles, MEC-Qaunt establishes a new state of the art for QAT.
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