arXiv:2605.13915stat.MLcs.AI2026-05被引 1

通过激活分解消除量化推理中的去量化瓶颈,提升大模型运行效率。

Multi-Scale Dequant: Eliminating Dequantization Bottleneck via Activation Decomposition for Efficient LLM Inference

论文配图:Multi-Scale Dequant: Eliminating Dequantization Bottleneck via Activation Decomposition for Efficient LLM Inference
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 将高精度激活分解为多尺度低精度分量,直接与量化权重重算
  • INT8/4位权重下实现近16/6.6有效比特,误差可控且计算时间不变
  • 适用于昇腾等异构加速器,显著降低显存占用和延迟

量化是高效大语言模型推理的关键技术,但去量化步骤——将低比特权重转换回高精度进行矩阵乘法——已成为现代AI加速器的瓶颈。在采用解耦计算单元的架构(如昇腾NPUs)上,去量化操作消耗的周期甚至超过矩阵乘法本身,导致高吞吐张量核心利用率低下。本文提出多尺度去量化(MSD)框架,将权重/键值对的去量化移出GEMM关键路径。不将低比特权重升至BF16精度,而是将高精度BF16激活分解为多个低精度分量,可直接通过硬件原生加速的GEMM与量化权重相乘。该方法从精度转换转向多尺度近似,避免了在GEMM前进行INT8到BF16的权重转换。我们为两种权重格式实例化了MSD,并推导出紧致误差界:对于INT8权重(W4A16),两阶段分解实现近16有效比特;对于MXFP4权重(W4A16),两阶段分解达到近6.6有效比特,每块误差界为1/64,优于单阶段MXFP8(5.24比特),且保持相同有效GEMM计算时间。我们进一步推导出闭式延迟与HBM流量模型,表明MSD可避免由去量化引发的Vector-Cube流水线阻塞,并在注意力机制中将键值缓存的HBM流量减少最多2.5倍。矩阵乘法与Flash Attention内核的数值仿真验证,MSD在精度上不劣于去量化基线,在多数场景下还具有更低的L2误差。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Quantization is essential for efficient large language model (LLM) inference, yet the dequantization step-converting low-bit weights back to high-precision for matrix multiplication has become a critical bottleneck on modern AI accelerators. On architectures with decoupled compute units (e.g., Ascend NPUs), dequantization operations can consume more cycles than the matrix multiplication itself, leaving the high-throughput tensor cores underutilized. This paper presents Multi-Scale Dequant (MSD), a quantization framework that removes weight/KV dequantization from the GEMM critical path. Instead of lifting low-bit weights to BF16 precision, MSD decomposes high-precision BF16 activations into multiple low-precision components, each of which can be multiplied directly with quantized weights via native hardware-accelerated GEMM. This approach shifts the computational paradigm from precision conversion to multi-scale approximation, avoiding INT8-to-BF16 weight conversion before GEMM. We instantiate MSD for two weight formats and derive tight error bounds for each. For INT8 weights (W4A16), two-pass INT8 decomposition achieves near 16 effective bits. For MXFP4 weights (W4A16), two-pass MXFP4 decomposition yields near 6.6 effective bits with error bound 1/64 per block surpassing single-pass MXFP8(5.24 bits) while maintaining the same effective GEMM compute time. We further derive closed-form latency and HBM traffic models showing that MSD avoids the Vector-Cube pipeline stall caused by dequantization and reduces KV cache HBM traffic by up to 2.5 times in attention. Numerical simulations on matrix multiplication and Flash Attention kernels confirm that MSD does not degrade accuracy compared to dequantization baselines, and in many settings achieves lower L2 error.

量化推理大模型优化昇腾加速内存优化

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