arXiv:2606.06527cs.ARcs.LG2026-06

NVFP4量化让边缘AI低功耗推理更高效,保持精度同时大幅降低存储和计算开销。

Characterizing the Impact of NVFP4 Quantization for Low-Power Edge AI Deployment

  • 采用四比特浮点与分块缩放机制,保留激活值动态范围。
  • 16块大小在4096输入下仅需4.5比特/输入,平衡精度与存储。
  • 无需重训练即可恢复精度,适合资源受限的边缘设备部署。

边缘端高效神经网络推理需降低算术成本、内存流量、计算能耗和存储开销,同时保持可接受的精度。本文聚焦于NVFP4量化在边缘高效模型中的影响,分析激活精度、权重精度、块大小扩展、重训练与模型精度间的关系。NVFP4激活使用4位浮点(FP4)数据、8位浮点(FP8)块尺度和32位浮点(FP32)张量尺度,实现超低精度推理的同时保留激活动态范围。对六种边缘高效模型的块大小消融实验表明,块大小B=16在N=4096时仅需4.5078比特/输入,提供良好的精度/存储权衡。权重精度消融显示,相同NVFP4激活路径下,FP8和FP16权重相比FP4权重仅带来微弱增益,说明激活量化与缩放主导了精度表现。为隔离NVFP4数据类型的收益,本文对比了传统无缩放的FP4推理与带缩放的NVFP4推理(有/无重训练)。结果表明,传统FP4推理导致多数紧凑模型精度崩溃,而未重训练的NVFP4已通过FP8块缩放和FP32张量缩放恢复显著精度。结合重训练后,NVFP4在所有测试模型中均取得最佳精度,验证了感知缩放的四比特浮点(NVFP4)推理的有效性。研究为跨多种加速器平台(包括GPU、Tensor Cores、FPGA、专用AI加速器、近存计算系统及新兴边缘架构)的软硬件协同设计提供了通用指导。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Energy-efficient neural-network inference at the edge requires reducing arithmetic cost, memory traffic, computation energy, and storage overhead while maintaining acceptable accuracy. This paper presents an ablation-focused study of NVFP4 quantization for edge-efficient neural networks, with emphasis on the relationship between activation precision, weight precision, block-size scaling, retraining, and model accuracy. NVFP4 activations are represented using 4-bit FP4 data, an FP8 block scale, and an FP32 tensor scale, enabling ultra-low precision inference while preserving activation dynamic range. A block-size ablation over six edge-efficient models shows that block size B = 16 provides a practical accuracy/storage trade-off, requiring only 4.5078 bits per input for N = 4096. A weight precision ablation further shows that FP8 and FP16 weights provide only modest gains over FP4 weights under the same NVFP4 activation path, suggesting that activation quantization and scaling dominate much of the accuracy behavior. To isolate the benefit of the NVFP4 data type, this work compares conventional unscaled FP4 activation inference and NVFP4 activation inference with and without retraining. The results show that conventional FP4 inference collapses accuracy for most compact models, while NVFP4 without retraining already recovers substantial accuracy by restoring activation dynamic range through FP8 block scaling and FP32 tensor scaling. When combined with retraining, NVFP4 achieves the best accuracy across the evaluated models, demonstrating the effectiveness of scaling-aware FP4 (NVFP4) inference. These findings provide general design guidance for hardware-software co-design of low power edge inference across a broad range of accelerator platforms, including GPUs, Tensor Cores, FPGAs, domain-specific AI accelerators, near-memory computing systems, and emerging edge-computing architectures.

量化边缘计算低功耗神经网络

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