Daily Papers

Weight-only post-training quantization (PTQ) compresses the weights of Large Language Models (LLMs) into low-precision representations to reduce memory footprint and accelerate inference. However, the presence of outliers in weights and activations often leads to large quantization errors and severe accuracy degradation, especially in recent reasoning LLMs where errors accumulate across long chains of thought. Existing PTQ methods either fail to sufficiently suppress outliers or introduce significant overhead during inference. In this paper, we propose Pairwise Rotation Quantization (ParoQuant), a weight-only PTQ method that combines hardware-efficient and optimizable independent Givens rotations with channel-wise scaling to even out the magnitude across channels and narrow the dynamic range within each quantization group. We further co-design the inference kernel to fully exploit GPU parallelism and keep the rotations and scaling lightweight at runtime. ParoQuant achieves an average 2.4% accuracy improvement over AWQ on reasoning tasks with less than 10% overhead. This paves the way for more efficient and accurate deployment of reasoning LLMs.

Mamba is an efficient sequence model that rivals Transformers and demonstrates significant potential as a foundational architecture for various tasks. Quantization is commonly used in neural networks to reduce model size and computational latency. However, applying quantization to Mamba remains underexplored, and existing quantization methods, which have been effective for CNN and Transformer models, appear inadequate for Mamba models (e.g., Quarot suffers a 21% accuracy drop on Vim-T^dagger even under W8A8). We have pioneered the exploration of this issue and identified several key challenges. First, significant outliers are present in gate projections, output projections, and matrix multiplications. Second, Mamba's unique parallel scan further amplifies these outliers, leading to uneven and heavy-tailed data distributions. Third, even with the application of the Hadamard transform, the variance across channels in weights and activations still remains inconsistent. To these ends, we propose MambaQuant, a post-training quantization (PTQ) framework consisting of: 1) Karhunen-Loeve Transformation (KLT) enhanced rotation, rendering the rotation matrix adaptable to diverse channel distributions. 2) Smooth-Fused rotation, which equalizes channel variances and can merge additional parameters into model weights. Experiments show that MambaQuant can quantize both weights and activations into 8-bit with less than 1% accuracy loss for Mamba-based vision and language tasks. To the best of our knowledge, MambaQuant is the first comprehensive PTQ design for the Mamba family, paving the way for further advancements in its application.

We introduce QuaRot, a new Quantization scheme based on Rotations, which is able to quantize LLMs end-to-end, including all weights, activations, and KV cache in 4 bits. QuaRot rotates LLMs in a way that removes outliers from the hidden state without changing the output, making quantization easier. This computational invariance is applied to the hidden state (residual) of the LLM, as well as to the activations of the feed-forward components, aspects of the attention mechanism and to the KV cache. The result is a quantized model where all matrix multiplications are performed in 4-bits, without any channels identified for retention in higher precision. Our quantized LLaMa2-70B model has losses of at most 0.29 WikiText-2 perplexity and retains 99% of the zero-shot performance. Code is available at: https://github.com/spcl/QuaRot.

Diffusion models have been widely adopted in image and video generation. However, their complex network architecture leads to high inference overhead for its generation process. Existing diffusion quantization methods primarily focus on the quantization of the model structure while ignoring the impact of time-steps variation during sampling. At the same time, most current approaches fail to account for significant activations that cannot be eliminated, resulting in substantial performance degradation after quantization. To address these issues, we propose Time-Rotation Diffusion Quantization (TR-DQ), a novel quantization method incorporating time-step and rotation-based optimization. TR-DQ first divides the sampling process based on time-steps and applies a rotation matrix to smooth activations and weights dynamically. For different time-steps, a dedicated hyperparameter is introduced for adaptive timing modeling, which enables dynamic quantization across different time steps. Additionally, we also explore the compression potential of Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG-wise) to establish a foundation for subsequent work. TR-DQ achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on image generation and video generation tasks and a 1.38-1.89x speedup and 1.97-2.58x memory reduction in inference compared to existing quantization methods.

In neural networks, it is often desirable to work with various representations of the same space. For example, 3D rotations can be represented with quaternions or Euler angles. In this paper, we advance a definition of a continuous representation, which can be helpful for training deep neural networks. We relate this to topological concepts such as homeomorphism and embedding. We then investigate what are continuous and discontinuous representations for 2D, 3D, and n-dimensional rotations. We demonstrate that for 3D rotations, all representations are discontinuous in the real Euclidean spaces of four or fewer dimensions. Thus, widely used representations such as quaternions and Euler angles are discontinuous and difficult for neural networks to learn. We show that the 3D rotations have continuous representations in 5D and 6D, which are more suitable for learning. We also present continuous representations for the general case of the n-dimensional rotation group SO(n). While our main focus is on rotations, we also show that our constructions apply to other groups such as the orthogonal group and similarity transforms. We finally present empirical results, which show that our continuous rotation representations outperform discontinuous ones for several practical problems in graphics and vision, including a simple autoencoder sanity test, a rotation estimator for 3D point clouds, and an inverse kinematics solver for 3D human poses.

Key-Value (KV) cache facilitates efficient large language models (LLMs) inference by avoiding recomputation of past KVs. As the batch size and context length increase, the oversized KV caches become a significant memory bottleneck, highlighting the need for efficient compression. Existing KV quantization rely on fine-grained quantization or the retention of a significant portion of high bit-widths caches, both of which compromise compression ratio and often fail to maintain robustness at extremely low average bit-widths. In this work, we explore the potential of rotation technique for 2-bit KV quantization and propose RotateKV, which achieves accurate and robust performance through the following innovations: (i) Outlier-Aware Rotation, which utilizes channel-reordering to adapt the rotations to varying channel-wise outlier distributions without sacrificing the computational efficiency of the fast Walsh-Hadamard transform (FWHT); (ii) Pre-RoPE Grouped-Head Rotation, which mitigates the impact of rotary position embedding (RoPE) on proposed outlier-aware rotation and further smooths outliers across heads; (iii) Attention-Sink-Aware Quantization, which leverages the massive activations to precisely identify and protect attention sinks. RotateKV achieves less than 0.3 perplexity (PPL) degradation with 2-bit quantization on WikiText-2 using LLaMA-2-13B, maintains strong CoT reasoning and long-context capabilities, with less than 1.7\% degradation on GSM8K, outperforming existing methods even at lower average bit-widths. RotateKV also showcases a 3.97x reduction in peak memory usage, supports 5.75x larger batch sizes, and achieves a 2.32x speedup in decoding stage.

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have achieved impressive performance in text-to-image and text-to-video generation. However, their high computational cost and large parameter sizes pose significant challenges for usage in resource-constrained scenarios. Effective compression of models has become a crucial issue that urgently needs to be addressed. Post-training quantization (PTQ) is a promising solution to reduce memory usage and accelerate inference, but existing PTQ methods suffer from severe performance degradation under extreme low-bit settings. After experiments and analysis, we identify two key obstacles to low-bit PTQ for DiTs: (1) the weights of DiT models follow a Gaussian-like distribution with long tails, causing uniform quantization to poorly allocate intervals and leading to significant quantization errors. This issue has been observed in the linear layer weights of different DiT models, which deeply limits the performance. (2) two types of activation outliers in DiT models: (i) Mild Outliers with slightly elevated values, and (ii) Salient Outliers with large magnitudes concentrated in specific channels, which disrupt activation quantization. To address these issues, we propose LRQ-DiT, an efficient and accurate post-training quantization framework for image and video generation. First, we introduce Twin-Log Quantization (TLQ), a log-based method that allocates more quantization intervals to the intermediate dense regions, effectively achieving alignment with the weight distribution and reducing quantization errors. Second, we propose an Adaptive Rotation Scheme (ARS) that dynamically applies Hadamard or outlier-aware rotations based on activation fluctuation, effectively mitigating the impact of both types of outliers. Extensive experiments on various text-to-image and text-to-video DiT models demonstrate that LRQ-DiT preserves high generation quality.

Post-training quantization (PTQ) techniques applied to weights, activations, and the KV cache greatly reduce memory usage, latency, and power consumption of Large Language Models (LLMs), but may lead to large quantization errors when outliers are present. Recent findings suggest that rotating activation or weight matrices helps remove outliers and benefits quantization. In this work, we identify a collection of applicable rotation parameterizations that lead to identical outputs in full-precision Transformer architectures, and find that some random rotations lead to much better quantization than others, with an up to 13 points difference in downstream zero-shot reasoning performance. As a result, we propose SpinQuant that optimizes (or learns) the rotation matrices with Cayley optimization on a small validation set. With 4-bit quantization of weight, activation, and KV-cache, SpinQuant narrows the accuracy gap on zero-shot reasoning tasks with full precision to merely 2.9 points on the LLaMA-2 7B model, surpassing LLM-QAT by 19.1 points and SmoothQuant by 25.0 points. SpinQuant also outperforms concurrent work QuaRot, which applies random rotations to remove outliers. In particular, for LLaMA-2 7B/LLaMA-3 8B models that are hard to quantize, SpinQuant reduces the gap to full precision by 30.2%/34.1% relative to QuaRot.

Learning-based 3D reconstruction models, represented by Visual Geometry Grounded Transformers (VGGTs), have made remarkable progress with the use of large-scale transformers. Their prohibitive computational and memory costs severely hinder real-world deployment. Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) has become a common practice for compressing and accelerating models. However, we empirically observe that PTQ faces unique obstacles when compressing billion-scale VGGTs: the data-independent special tokens induce heavy-tailed activation distributions, while the multi-view nature of 3D data makes calibration sample selection highly unstable. This paper proposes the first Quantization framework for VGGTs, namely QuantVGGT. This mainly relies on two technical contributions: First, we introduce Dual-Smoothed Fine-Grained Quantization, which integrates pre-global Hadamard rotation and post-local channel smoothing to mitigate heavy-tailed distributions and inter-channel variance robustly. Second, we design Noise-Filtered Diverse Sampling, which filters outliers via deep-layer statistics and constructs frame-aware diverse calibration clusters to ensure stable quantization ranges. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that QuantVGGT achieves the state-of-the-art results across different benchmarks and bit-width, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art generic quantization method with a great margin. We highlight that our 4-bit QuantVGGT can deliver a 3.7times memory reduction and 2.5times acceleration in real-hardware inference, while maintaining reconstruction accuracy above 98\% of its full-precision counterpart. This demonstrates the vast advantages and practicality of QuantVGGT in resource-constrained scenarios. Our code is released in https://github.com/wlfeng0509/QuantVGGT.

Pairwise pose estimation from images with little or no overlap is an open challenge in computer vision. Existing methods, even those trained on large-scale datasets, struggle in these scenarios due to the lack of identifiable correspondences or visual overlap. Inspired by the human ability to infer spatial relationships from diverse scenes, we propose a novel approach, InterPose, that leverages the rich priors encoded within pre-trained generative video models. We propose to use a video model to hallucinate intermediate frames between two input images, effectively creating a dense, visual transition, which significantly simplifies the problem of pose estimation. Since current video models can still produce implausible motion or inconsistent geometry, we introduce a self-consistency score that evaluates the consistency of pose predictions from sampled videos. We demonstrate that our approach generalizes among three state-of-the-art video models and show consistent improvements over the state-of-the-art DUSt3R on four diverse datasets encompassing indoor, outdoor, and object-centric scenes. Our findings suggest a promising avenue for improving pose estimation models by leveraging large generative models trained on vast amounts of video data, which is more readily available than 3D data. See our project page for results: https://inter-pose.github.io/.

Layer-wise quantization is a key technique for efficiently compressing large models without expensive retraining. Previous methods typically quantize the weights of each layer by "uniformly" optimizing the layer reconstruction loss across all output tokens. However, in this paper, we demonstrate that better-quantized models can be obtained by prioritizing learning from important tokens (e.g. which have large attention scores). Building on this finding, we propose RSQ (Rotate, Scale, then Quantize), which (1) applies rotations (orthogonal transformation) to the model to mitigate outliers (those with exceptionally large magnitude), (2) scales the token feature based on its importance, and (3) quantizes the model using the GPTQ framework with the second-order statistics computed by scaled tokens. To compute token importance, we explore both heuristic and dynamic strategies. Based on a thorough analysis of all approaches, we adopt attention concentration, which uses attention scores of each token as its importance, as the best approach. We demonstrate that RSQ consistently outperforms baseline methods across multiple downstream tasks and three model families: LLaMA3, Mistral, and Qwen2.5. Additionally, models quantized with RSQ achieve superior performance on long-context tasks, further highlighting its effectiveness. Lastly, RSQ demonstrates generalizability across various setups, including different model sizes, calibration datasets, bit precisions, and quantization methods.

This paper accelerates video perception, such as semantic segmentation and human pose estimation, by levering cross-frame redundancies. Unlike the existing approaches, which avoid redundant computations by warping the past features using optical-flow or by performing sparse convolutions on frame differences, we approach the problem from a new perspective: low-bit quantization. We observe that residuals, as the difference in network activations between two neighboring frames, exhibit properties that make them highly quantizable. Based on this observation, we propose a novel quantization scheme for video networks coined as Residual Quantization. ResQ extends the standard, frame-by-frame, quantization scheme by incorporating temporal dependencies that lead to better performance in terms of accuracy vs. bit-width. Furthermore, we extend our model to dynamically adjust the bit-width proportional to the amount of changes in the video. We demonstrate the superiority of our model, against the standard quantization and existing efficient video perception models, using various architectures on semantic segmentation and human pose estimation benchmarks.

Quantization to low bitwidth is a standard approach for deploying large language models, however, a few extreme weights and activations stretch the dynamic range and reduce the effective resolution of the quantizer. A common mitigation approach is to apply some fixed orthogonal transforms, such as Hadamard matrices, before quantization, which typically reduces the dynamic range. Yet, these transforms ignore the statistics of the data, and their optimality is currently not understood. In this work, we derive, for the first time, closed-form optimal linear blockwise transforms for joint weight-activation quantization using standard data-free quantizers for common numerical formats. Specifically, we provide derivations of the optimal adaptive (data-aware) transforms for round-to-nearest (RTN), AbsMax-scaled block quantizers for both integer and floating-point formats. The resulting construction, which we call WUSH, combines a Hadamard backbone with a data-dependent component based on second-order moments, yielding a non-orthogonal transform that is provably optimal under mild assumptions and remains structured for efficient implementation. Preliminary experimental results show that our approach consistently improves upon the Hadamard transform for common formats.

Low-bit quantization is challenging to maintain high performance with limited model capacity (e.g., 4-bit for both weights and activations). Naturally, the distribution of both weights and activations in deep neural network are Gaussian-like. Nevertheless, due to the limited bitwidth of low-bit model, uniform-like distributed weights and activations have been proved to be more friendly to quantization while preserving accuracy~Han2015Learning. Motivated by this, we propose Scale-Clip, a Distribution Reshaping technique that can reshape weights or activations into a uniform-like distribution in a dynamic manner. Furthermore, to increase the model capability for a low-bit model, a novel Group-based Quantization algorithm is proposed to split the filters into several groups. Different groups can learn different quantization parameters, which can be elegantly merged in to batch normalization layer without extra computational cost in the inference stage. Finally, we integrate Scale-Clip technique with Group-based Quantization algorithm and propose the Group-based Distribution Reshaping Quantization (GDQR) framework to further improve the quantization performance. Experiments on various networks (e.g. VGGNet and ResNet) and vision tasks (e.g. classification, detection and segmentation) demonstrate that our framework achieves good performance.

Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) integrates quantization into the training loop, enabling LLMs to learn robust low-bit representations, and is widely recognized as one of the most promising research directions. All current QAT research focuses on minimizing quantization error on full-precision models, where the full-precision accuracy acts as an upper bound (accuracy ceiling). No existing method has even attempted to surpass this ceiling. To break this ceiling, we propose a new paradigm: raising the ceiling (full-precision model), and then still quantizing it efficiently into 2 bits. We propose Fairypm i, the first 2-bit quantization framework for complex-valued LLMs. Specifically, our method leverages the representational advantages of the complex domain to boost full-precision accuracy. We map weights to the fourth roots of unity {pm1, pm i}, forming a perfectly symmetric and information-theoretically optimal 2-bit representation. Importantly, each quantized weight has either a zero real or imaginary part, enabling multiplication-free inference using only additions and element swaps. Experimental results show that Fairypm i outperforms the ceiling of existing 2-bit quantization approaches in terms of both PPL and downstream tasks, while maintaining strict storage and compute efficiency. This work opens a new direction for building highly accurate and practical LLMs under extremely low-bit constraints.

Quantizing large language models has become a standard way to reduce their memory and computational costs. Typically, existing methods focus on breaking down the problem into individual layer-wise sub-problems, and minimizing per-layer error, measured via various metrics. Yet, this approach currently lacks theoretical justification and the metrics employed may be sub-optimal. In this paper, we present a "linearity theorem" establishing a direct relationship between the layer-wise ell_2 reconstruction error and the model perplexity increase due to quantization. This insight enables two novel applications: (1) a simple data-free LLM quantization method using Hadamard rotations and MSE-optimal grids, dubbed HIGGS, which outperforms all prior data-free approaches such as the extremely popular NF4 quantized format, and (2) an optimal solution to the problem of finding non-uniform per-layer quantization levels which match a given compression constraint in the medium-bitwidth regime, obtained by reduction to dynamic programming. On the practical side, we demonstrate improved accuracy-compression trade-offs on Llama-3.1 and 3.2-family models, as well as on Qwen-family models. Further, we show that our method can be efficiently supported in terms of GPU kernels at various batch sizes, advancing both data-free and non-uniform quantization for LLMs.

Edge applications, such as collaborative robotics and spacecraft rendezvous, demand efficient 6D object pose estimation on resource-constrained embedded platforms. Existing 6D pose estimation networks are often too large for such deployments, necessitating compression while maintaining reliable performance. To address this challenge, we introduce Modular Quantization-Aware Training (MQAT), an adaptive and mixed-precision quantization-aware training strategy that exploits the modular structure of modern 6D pose estimation architectures. MQAT guides a systematic gradated modular quantization sequence and determines module-specific bit precisions, leading to quantized models that outperform those produced by state-of-the-art uniform and mixed-precision quantization techniques. Our experiments showcase the generality of MQAT across datasets, architectures, and quantization algorithms. Remarkably, MQAT-trained quantized models achieve a significant accuracy boost (>7%) over the baseline full-precision network while reducing model size by a factor of 4x or more.

This is an exploratory study that discovers the current image quantization (vector quantization) do not satisfy translation equivariance in the quantized space due to aliasing. Instead of focusing on anti-aliasing, we propose a simple yet effective way to achieve translation-equivariant image quantization by enforcing orthogonality among the codebook embeddings. To explore the advantages of translation-equivariant image quantization, we conduct three proof-of-concept experiments with a carefully controlled dataset: (1) text-to-image generation, where the quantized image indices are the target to predict, (2) image-to-text generation, where the quantized image indices are given as a condition, (3) using a smaller training set to analyze sample efficiency. From the strictly controlled experiments, we empirically verify that the translation-equivariant image quantizer improves not only sample efficiency but also the accuracy over VQGAN up to +11.9% in text-to-image generation and +3.9% in image-to-text generation.

Despite significant advancements in human motion generation, current motion representations, typically formulated as discrete frame sequences, still face two critical limitations: (i) they fail to capture motion from a multi-scale perspective, limiting the capability in complex patterns modeling; (ii) they lack compositional flexibility, which is crucial for model's generalization in diverse generation tasks. To address these challenges, we introduce MSQ, a novel quantization method that compresses the motion sequence into multi-scale discrete tokens across spatial and temporal dimensions. MSQ employs distinct encoders to capture body parts at varying spatial granularities and temporally interpolates the encoded features into multiple scales before quantizing them into discrete tokens. Building on this representation, we establish a generative mask modeling model to effectively support motion editing, motion control, and conditional motion generation. Through quantitative and qualitative analysis, we show that our quantization method enables the seamless composition of motion tokens without requiring specialized design or re-training. Furthermore, extensive evaluations demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing baseline methods on various benchmarks.

Although quantization for linear layers has been widely used, its application to accelerate the attention process remains limited. SageAttention utilizes 8-bit matrix multiplication, 16-bit matrix multiplication with 16-bit accumulator, and precision-enhancing methods, implementing an accurate and 2x speedup kernel compared to FlashAttention2. To further enhance the efficiency of attention computation while maintaining precision, we propose SageAttention2, which utilizes significantly faster 4-bit matrix multiplication (Matmul) alongside additional precision-enhancing techniques. First, we propose to quantize matrixes (Q, K) to INT4 in a warp-level granularity and quantize matrixes (widetilde P, V) to FP8. Second, we propose a method to smooth Q and V, enhancing the accuracy of attention with INT4 QK and FP8 PV. Third, we analyze the quantization accuracy across timesteps and layers, then propose an adaptive quantization method to ensure the end-to-end metrics over various models. The operations per second (OPS) of SageAttention2 surpass FlashAttention2 and xformers by about 3x and 5x on RTX4090, respectively. Comprehensive experiments confirm that our approach incurs negligible end-to-end metrics loss across diverse models, including those for large language processing, image generation, and video generation. The codes are available at https://github.com/thu-ml/SageAttention.

Quantization Aware Training (QAT) is a neural network quantization technique that compresses model size and improves operational efficiency while effectively maintaining model performance. The paradigm of QAT is to introduce fake quantization operators during the training process, allowing the model to autonomously compensate for information loss caused by quantization. Making quantization parameters trainable can significantly improve the performance of QAT, but at the cost of compromising the flexibility during inference, especially when dealing with activation values with substantially different distributions. In this paper, we propose an effective learnable adaptive neural network quantization method, called Adaptive Step Size Quantization (ASQ), to resolve this conflict. Specifically, the proposed ASQ method first dynamically adjusts quantization scaling factors through a trained module capable of accommodating different activations. Then, to address the rigid resolution issue inherent in Power of Two (POT) quantization, we propose an efficient non-uniform quantization scheme. We utilize the Power Of Square root of Two (POST) as the basis for exponential quantization, effectively handling the bell-shaped distribution of neural network weights across various bit-widths while maintaining computational efficiency through a Look-Up Table method (LUT). Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed ASQ method is superior to the state-of-the-art QAT approaches. Notably that the ASQ is even competitive compared to full precision baselines, with its 4-bit quantized ResNet34 model improving accuracy by 1.2\% on ImageNet.

Vector Quantized Variational AutoEncoders (VQ-VAEs) are designed to compress a continuous input to a discrete latent space and reconstruct it with minimal distortion. They operate by maintaining a set of vectors -- often referred to as the codebook -- and quantizing each encoder output to the nearest vector in the codebook. However, as vector quantization is non-differentiable, the gradient to the encoder flows around the vector quantization layer rather than through it in a straight-through approximation. This approximation may be undesirable as all information from the vector quantization operation is lost. In this work, we propose a way to propagate gradients through the vector quantization layer of VQ-VAEs. We smoothly transform each encoder output into its corresponding codebook vector via a rotation and rescaling linear transformation that is treated as a constant during backpropagation. As a result, the relative magnitude and angle between encoder output and codebook vector becomes encoded into the gradient as it propagates through the vector quantization layer and back to the encoder. Across 11 different VQ-VAE training paradigms, we find this restructuring improves reconstruction metrics, codebook utilization, and quantization error. Our code is available at https://github.com/cfifty/rotation_trick.

Quantizing neural networks is one of the most effective methods for achieving efficient inference on mobile and embedded devices. In particular, mixed precision quantized (MPQ) networks, whose layers can be quantized to different bitwidths, achieve better task performance for the same resource constraint compared to networks with homogeneous bitwidths. However, finding the optimal bitwidth allocation is a challenging problem as the search space grows exponentially with the number of layers in the network. In this paper, we propose QBitOpt, a novel algorithm for updating bitwidths during quantization-aware training (QAT). We formulate the bitwidth allocation problem as a constraint optimization problem. By combining fast-to-compute sensitivities with efficient solvers during QAT, QBitOpt can produce mixed-precision networks with high task performance guaranteed to satisfy strict resource constraints. This contrasts with existing mixed-precision methods that learn bitwidths using gradients and cannot provide such guarantees. We evaluate QBitOpt on ImageNet and confirm that we outperform existing fixed and mixed-precision methods under average bitwidth constraints commonly found in the literature.

Diffusion Models (DM) have democratized AI image generation through an iterative denoising process. Quantization is a major technique to alleviate the inference cost and reduce the size of DM denoiser networks. However, as denoisers evolve from variants of convolutional U-Nets toward newer Transformer architectures, it is of growing importance to understand the quantization sensitivity of different weight layers, operations and architecture types to performance. In this work, we address this challenge with Qua^2SeDiMo, a mixed-precision Post-Training Quantization framework that generates explainable insights on the cost-effectiveness of various model weight quantization methods for different denoiser operation types and block structures. We leverage these insights to make high-quality mixed-precision quantization decisions for a myriad of diffusion models ranging from foundational U-Nets to state-of-the-art Transformers. As a result, Qua^2SeDiMo can construct 3.4-bit, 3.9-bit, 3.65-bit and 3.7-bit weight quantization on PixArt-{alpha}, PixArt-{Sigma}, Hunyuan-DiT and SDXL, respectively. We further pair our weight-quantization configurations with 6-bit activation quantization and outperform existing approaches in terms of quantitative metrics and generative image quality.

Model quantization is widely applied for compressing and accelerating deep neural networks (DNNs). However, conventional Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) focuses on training DNNs with uniform bit-width. The bit-width settings vary across different hardware and transmission demands, which induces considerable training and storage costs. Hence, the scheme of one-shot joint training multiple precisions is proposed to address this issue. Previous works either store a larger FP32 model to switch between different precision models for higher accuracy or store a smaller INT8 model but compromise accuracy due to using shared quantization parameters. In this paper, we introduce the Double Rounding quantization method, which fully utilizes the quantized representation range to accomplish nearly lossless bit-switching while reducing storage by using the highest integer precision instead of full precision. Furthermore, we observe a competitive interference among different precisions during one-shot joint training, primarily due to inconsistent gradients of quantization scales during backward propagation. To tackle this problem, we propose an Adaptive Learning Rate Scaling (ALRS) technique that dynamically adapts learning rates for various precisions to optimize the training process. Additionally, we extend our Double Rounding to one-shot mixed precision training and develop a Hessian-Aware Stochastic Bit-switching (HASB) strategy. Experimental results on the ImageNet-1K classification demonstrate that our methods have enough advantages to state-of-the-art one-shot joint QAT in both multi-precision and mixed-precision. We also validate the feasibility of our method on detection and segmentation tasks, as well as on LLMs task. Our codes are available at https://github.com/haiduo/Double-Rounding.

The Transformer architecture has revolutionized various regions since it was proposed, and its effectiveness largely depends on the ability to encode positional information. Traditional position encoding methods exhibit significant limitations due to lack of robustness and flexibility of position. Therefore, Rotary Positional Encoding (RoPE) was proposed to alleviate these issues, which integrates positional information by rotating the embeddings in the attention mechanism. However, RoPE requires manually defined rotation matrices with limited transformation space, constraining the model's capacity. In this work, we propose ComRoPE, which generalizes RoPE by defining it in terms of trainable commuting angle matrices. Specifically, we demonstrate that pairwise commutativity of these matrices is essential for RoPE to achieve scalability and positional robustness. We formally define the RoPE Equation, which is an essential condition that ensures consistent performance with position offsets. Based on the theoretical analysis, we present two types of trainable commuting angle matrices as sufficient solutions to the RoPE equation, which significantly improve performance, surpassing the current state-of-the-art method by 1.6% at training resolution and 2.9% at higher resolution on the ImageNet-1K dataset. Furthermore, our framework shows versatility in generalizing to existing RoPE formulations and offering new insights for future positional encoding research. To ensure reproducibility, the source code and instructions are available at https://github.com/Longin-Yu/ComRoPE

Video diffusion models (DMs) have enabled high-quality video synthesis. Yet, their substantial computational and memory demands pose serious challenges to real-world deployment, even on high-end GPUs. As a commonly adopted solution, quantization has proven notable success in reducing cost for image DMs, while its direct application to video DMs remains ineffective. In this paper, we present QVGen, a novel quantization-aware training (QAT) framework tailored for high-performance and inference-efficient video DMs under extremely low-bit quantization (e.g., 4-bit or below). We begin with a theoretical analysis demonstrating that reducing the gradient norm is essential to facilitate convergence for QAT. To this end, we introduce auxiliary modules (Phi) to mitigate large quantization errors, leading to significantly enhanced convergence. To eliminate the inference overhead of Phi, we propose a rank-decay strategy that progressively eliminates Phi. Specifically, we repeatedly employ singular value decomposition (SVD) and a proposed rank-based regularization gamma to identify and decay low-contributing components. This strategy retains performance while zeroing out inference overhead. Extensive experiments across 4 state-of-the-art (SOTA) video DMs, with parameter sizes ranging from 1.3B sim14B, show that QVGen is the first to reach full-precision comparable quality under 4-bit settings. Moreover, it significantly outperforms existing methods. For instance, our 3-bit CogVideoX-2B achieves improvements of +25.28 in Dynamic Degree and +8.43 in Scene Consistency on VBench.

Network quantization generally converts full-precision weights and/or activations into low-bit fixed-point values in order to accelerate an inference process. Recent approaches to network quantization further discretize the gradients into low-bit fixed-point values, enabling an efficient training. They typically set a quantization interval using a min-max range of the gradients or adjust the interval such that the quantization error for entire gradients is minimized. In this paper, we analyze the quantization error of gradients for the low-bit fixed-point training, and show that lowering the error for large-magnitude gradients boosts the quantization performance significantly. Based on this, we derive an upper bound of quantization error for the large gradients in terms of the quantization interval, and obtain an optimal condition for the interval minimizing the quantization error for large gradients. We also introduce an interval update algorithm that adjusts the quantization interval adaptively to maintain a small quantization error for large gradients. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our quantization method for various combinations of network architectures and bit-widths on various tasks, including image classification, object detection, and super-resolution.

Post-training quantization (PTQ) has stood out as a cost-effective and promising model compression paradigm in recent years, as it avoids computationally intensive model retraining. Nevertheless, current PTQ methods for Vision Transformers (ViTs) still suffer from significant accuracy degradation, especially under low-bit quantization. To address these shortcomings, we analyze the prevailing Hessian-guided quantization loss, and uncover certain limitations of conventional Hessian approximations. By following the block-wise reconstruction framework, we propose a novel PTQ method for ViTs, dubbed FIMA-Q. Specifically, we firstly establish the connection between KL divergence and FIM, which enables fast computation of the quantization loss during reconstruction. We further propose an efficient FIM approximation method, namely DPLR-FIM, by employing the diagonal plus low-rank principle, and formulate the ultimate quantization loss. Our extensive experiments, conducted across various vision tasks with representative ViT-based architectures on public datasets, demonstrate that our method substantially promotes the accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art approaches, especially in the case of low-bit quantization. The source code is available at https://github.com/ShiheWang/FIMA-Q.

Novel-view synthesis (NVS) can be tackled through different approaches, depending on the general setting: a single source image to a short video sequence, exact or noisy camera pose information, 3D-based information such as point clouds etc. The most challenging scenario, the one where we stand in this work, only considers a unique source image to generate a novel one from another viewpoint. However, in such a tricky situation, the latest learning-based solutions often struggle to integrate the camera viewpoint transformation. Indeed, the extrinsic information is often passed as-is, through a low-dimensional vector. It might even occur that such a camera pose, when parametrized as Euler angles, is quantized through a one-hot representation. This vanilla encoding choice prevents the learnt architecture from inferring novel views on a continuous basis (from a camera pose perspective). We claim it exists an elegant way to better encode relative camera pose, by leveraging 3D-related concepts such as the epipolar constraint. We, therefore, introduce an innovative method that encodes the viewpoint transformation as a 2D feature image. Such a camera encoding strategy gives meaningful insights to the network regarding how the camera has moved in space between the two views. By encoding the camera pose information as a finite number of coloured epipolar lines, we demonstrate through our experiments that our strategy outperforms vanilla encoding.

The optimal bit-width for achieving the best trade-off between quantized model size and accuracy has been a subject of ongoing debate. While some advocate for 4-bit quantization, others propose that 1.58-bit offers superior results. However, the lack of a cohesive framework for different bits has left such conclusions relatively tenuous. We present ParetoQ, the first unified framework that facilitates rigorous comparisons across 1-bit, 1.58-bit, 2-bit, 3-bit, and 4-bit quantization settings. Our findings reveal a notable learning transition between 2 and 3 bits: For 3-bits and above, the fine-tuned models stay close to their original pre-trained distributions, whereas for learning 2-bit networks or below, the representations change drastically. By optimizing training schemes and refining quantization functions, ParetoQ surpasses all previous methods tailored to specific bit widths. Remarkably, our ParetoQ ternary 600M-parameter model even outperforms the previous SoTA ternary 3B-parameter model in accuracy, using only one-fifth of the parameters. Extensive experimentation shows that ternary, 2-bit, and 3-bit quantization maintains comparable performance in the size-accuracy trade-off and generally exceeds 4-bit and binary quantization. Considering hardware constraints, 2-bit quantization offers promising potential for memory reduction and speedup.

We propose the use of low bit-depth Sigma-Delta and distributed noise-shaping methods for quantizing the Random Fourier features (RFFs) associated with shift-invariant kernels. We prove that our quantized RFFs -- even in the case of 1-bit quantization -- allow a high accuracy approximation of the underlying kernels, and the approximation error decays at least polynomially fast as the dimension of the RFFs increases. We also show that the quantized RFFs can be further compressed, yielding an excellent trade-off between memory use and accuracy. Namely, the approximation error now decays exponentially as a function of the bits used. Moreover, we empirically show by testing the performance of our methods on several machine learning tasks that our method compares favorably to other state of the art quantization methods in this context.

Large transformer models have demonstrated remarkable success. Post-training quantization (PTQ), which requires only a small dataset for calibration and avoids end-to-end retraining, is a promising solution for compressing these large models. Regrettably, existing PTQ methods typically exhibit non-trivial performance loss. We find that the performance bottleneck stems from over-consideration of hardware compatibility in the quantization process, compelling them to reluctantly employ simple quantizers, albeit at the expense of accuracy. With the above insights, we propose RepQuant, a novel PTQ framework with quantization-inference decoupling paradigm to address the above issues. RepQuant employs complex quantizers in the quantization process and simplified quantizers in the inference process, and performs mathematically equivalent transformations between the two through quantization scale reparameterization, thus ensuring both accurate quantization and efficient inference. More specifically, we focus on two components with extreme distributions: LayerNorm activations and Softmax activations. Initially, we apply channel-wise quantization and log2 quantization, respectively, which are tailored to their distributions. In particular, for the former, we introduce a learnable per-channel dual clipping scheme, which is designed to efficiently identify outliers in the unbalanced activations with fine granularity. Then, we reparameterize the scales to hardware-friendly layer-wise quantization and log2 quantization for inference. Moreover, quantized weight reconstruction is seamlessly integrated into the above procedure to further push the performance limits. Extensive experiments are performed on different large-scale transformer variants on multiple tasks, including vision, language, and multi-modal transformers, and RepQuant encouragingly demonstrates significant performance advantages.

We propose a new problem, In-2-4D, for generative 4D (i.e., 3D + motion) inbetweening from a minimalistic input setting: two single-view images capturing an object in two distinct motion states. Given two images representing the start and end states of an object in motion, our goal is to generate and reconstruct the motion in 4D. We utilize a video interpolation model to predict the motion, but large frame-to-frame motions can lead to ambiguous interpretations. To overcome this, we employ a hierarchical approach to identify keyframes that are visually close to the input states and show significant motion, then generate smooth fragments between them. For each fragment, we construct the 3D representation of the keyframe using Gaussian Splatting. The temporal frames within the fragment guide the motion, enabling their transformation into dynamic Gaussians through a deformation field. To improve temporal consistency and refine 3D motion, we expand the self-attention of multi-view diffusion across timesteps and apply rigid transformation regularization. Finally, we merge the independently generated 3D motion segments by interpolating boundary deformation fields and optimizing them to align with the guiding video, ensuring smooth and flicker-free transitions. Through extensive qualitative and quantitiave experiments as well as a user study, we show the effectiveness of our method and its components. The project page is available at https://in-2-4d.github.io/

Multi-view stereo reconstruction (MVS) in the wild requires to first estimate the camera parameters e.g. intrinsic and extrinsic parameters. These are usually tedious and cumbersome to obtain, yet they are mandatory to triangulate corresponding pixels in 3D space, which is the core of all best performing MVS algorithms. In this work, we take an opposite stance and introduce DUSt3R, a radically novel paradigm for Dense and Unconstrained Stereo 3D Reconstruction of arbitrary image collections, i.e. operating without prior information about camera calibration nor viewpoint poses. We cast the pairwise reconstruction problem as a regression of pointmaps, relaxing the hard constraints of usual projective camera models. We show that this formulation smoothly unifies the monocular and binocular reconstruction cases. In the case where more than two images are provided, we further propose a simple yet effective global alignment strategy that expresses all pairwise pointmaps in a common reference frame. We base our network architecture on standard Transformer encoders and decoders, allowing us to leverage powerful pretrained models. Our formulation directly provides a 3D model of the scene as well as depth information, but interestingly, we can seamlessly recover from it, pixel matches, relative and absolute camera. Exhaustive experiments on all these tasks showcase that the proposed DUSt3R can unify various 3D vision tasks and set new SoTAs on monocular/multi-view depth estimation as well as relative pose estimation. In summary, DUSt3R makes many geometric 3D vision tasks easy.

Post-training quantization (PTQ) of large language models (LLMs) holds the promise in reducing the prohibitive computational cost at inference time. Quantization of all weight, activation and key-value (KV) cache tensors to 4-bit without significantly degrading generalizability is challenging, due to the high quantization error caused by extreme outliers in activations. To tackle this problem, we propose ResQ, a PTQ method that pushes further the state-of-the-art. By means of principal component analysis (PCA), it identifies a low-rank subspace (in practice 1/8 of the hidden dimension) in which activation variances are highest, and keep the coefficients within this subspace in high precision, e.g. 8-bit, while quantizing the rest to 4-bit. Within each subspace, invariant random rotation is applied to further suppress outliers. We show that this is a provably optimal mixed precision quantization scheme that minimizes error. With the Llama and Qwen2.5 families of models, we demonstrate that ResQ outperforms recent uniform and mixed precision PTQ methods on a variety of benchmarks, achieving up to 33\% lower perplexity on Wikitext than the next best method SpinQuant, and upto 3\times speedup over 16-bit baseline. Code is available at https://github.com/utkarsh-dmx/project-resq.

Quantizing the weights of a neural network has two steps: (1) Finding a good low bit-complexity representation for weights (which we call the quantization grid) and (2) Rounding the original weights to values in the quantization grid. In this paper, we study the problem of rounding optimally given any quantization grid. The simplest and most commonly used way to round is Round-to-Nearest (RTN). By rounding in a data-dependent way instead, one can improve the quality of the quantized model significantly. We study the rounding problem from the lens of discrepancy theory, which studies how well we can round a continuous solution to a discrete solution without affecting solution quality too much. We prove that given m=poly(1/ε) samples from the data distribution, we can round all but O(m) model weights such that the expected approximation error of the quantized model on the true data distribution is le ε as long as the space of gradients of the original model is approximately low rank (which we empirically validate). Our proof, which is algorithmic, inspired a simple and practical rounding algorithm called DiscQuant. In our experiments, we demonstrate that DiscQuant significantly improves over the prior state-of-the-art rounding method called GPTQ and the baseline RTN over a range of benchmarks on Phi3mini-3.8B and Llama3.1-8B. For example, rounding Phi3mini-3.8B to a fixed quantization grid with 3.25 bits per parameter using DiscQuant gets 64\% accuracy on the GSM8k dataset, whereas GPTQ achieves 54\% and RTN achieves 31\% (the original model achieves 84\%). We make our code available at https://github.com/jerry-chee/DiscQuant.

Post-training quantization (PTQ) has emerged as a practical approach to compress large neural networks, making them highly efficient for deployment. However, effectively reducing these models to their low-bit counterparts without compromising the original accuracy remains a key challenge. In this paper, we propose an innovative PTQ algorithm termed COMQ, which sequentially conducts coordinate-wise minimization of the layer-wise reconstruction errors. We consider the widely used integer quantization, where every quantized weight can be decomposed into a shared floating-point scalar and an integer bit-code. Within a fixed layer, COMQ treats all the scaling factor(s) and bit-codes as the variables of the reconstruction error. Every iteration improves this error along a single coordinate while keeping all other variables constant. COMQ is easy to use and requires no hyper-parameter tuning. It instead involves only dot products and rounding operations. We update these variables in a carefully designed greedy order, significantly enhancing the accuracy. COMQ achieves remarkable results in quantizing 4-bit Vision Transformers, with a negligible loss of less than 1% in Top-1 accuracy. In 4-bit INT quantization of convolutional neural networks, COMQ maintains near-lossless accuracy with a minimal drop of merely 0.3% in Top-1 accuracy.

We study weight-only post-training quantization (PTQ), which quantizes the weights of a large language model (LLM) without retraining, using little or no calibration data. Weight-only PTQ is crucial for reducing the memory footprint and latency of LLM inference, especially in memory-bound, small-batch inference scenarios, such as personalized inference on edge devices. Despite its importance, irregular weight distributions with heavy-tailed outliers in LLMs complicate quantization, recently motivating rotation-based methods that transform weights into near-Gaussian distributions, which are more regular with fewer outliers, thereby reducing quantization error. In this work, we first derive the information-theoretically optimal bit allocation for Gaussianized weights under given bit budgets, revealing that fine-grained fractional-bit quantizers approaching the Gaussian distortion-rate bound are essential to achieve near-optimal quantization performance. To bridge this theoretical insight and practical implementation, we introduce Q-Palette, a versatile collection of fractional-bit quantizers that range from trellis-coded quantizers offering near-optimal distortion to simpler vector and scalar quantizers optimized for faster inference, all efficiently implemented with optimized CUDA kernels across various bitwidths. Furthermore, leveraging Q-Palette as a foundational component, we propose a novel mixed-scheme quantization framework, jointly optimizing quantizer choices and layer fusion decisions given resource constraints. The code is available at https://github.com/snu-mllab/Q-Palette.

Model quantification uses low bit-width values to represent the weight matrices of models, which is a promising approach to reduce both storage and computational overheads of deploying highly anticipated LLMs. However, existing quantization methods suffer severe performance degradation when the bit-width is extremely reduced, and thus focus on utilizing 4-bit or 8-bit values to quantize models. This paper boldly quantizes the weight matrices of LLMs to 1-bit, paving the way for the extremely low bit-width deployment of LLMs. For this target, we introduce a 1-bit quantization-aware training (QAT) framework named OneBit, including a novel 1-bit parameter representation method to better quantize LLMs as well as an effective parameter initialization method based on matrix decomposition to improve the convergence speed of the QAT framework. Sufficient experimental results indicate that OneBit achieves good performance (at least 83% of the non-quantized performance) with robust training processes when only using 1-bit weight matrices.

Recent works on compression of large language models (LLM) using quantization considered reparameterizing the architecture such that weights are distributed on the sphere. This demonstratively improves the ability to quantize by increasing the mathematical notion of coherence, resulting in fewer weight outliers without affecting the network output. In this work, we aim to further exploit this spherical geometry of the weights when performing quantization by considering Pyramid Vector Quantization (PVQ) for large language models. Arranging points evenly on the sphere is notoriously difficult, especially in high dimensions, and in case approximate solutions exists, representing points explicitly in a codebook is typically not feasible due to its additional memory cost. Instead, PVQ uses a fixed integer lattice on the sphere by projecting points onto the 1-sphere, which allows for efficient encoding and decoding without requiring an explicit codebook in memory. To obtain a practical algorithm, we propose to combine PVQ with scale quantization for which we derive theoretically optimal quantizations, under empirically verified assumptions. Further, we extend pyramid vector quantization to use Hessian information to minimize quantization error under expected feature activations, instead of only relying on weight magnitudes. Experimentally, we achieves state-of-the-art quantization performance with pareto-optimal trade-off between performance and bits per weight and bits per activation, compared to compared methods. On weight-only, we find that we can quantize a Llama-3 70B model to 3.25 bits per weight and retain 98\% accuracy on downstream tasks.

The recent hardware-accelerated microscaling 4-bit floating-point formats such as MXFP4 and NVFP4, supported on NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, promise to revolutionize large language model (LLM) inference. Yet, their practical benefits remain unproven. We present the first comprehensive study of MXFP4 and NVFP4 for post-training quantization, revealing gaps between their promise and real-world performance. Our analysis shows that state-of-the-art methods struggle with FP4, due to two key issues: (1) NVFP4's small group size provably neutralizes traditional outlier mitigation techniques; (2) MXFP4's power-of-two scale quantization severely degrades accuracy due to high induced error. To bridge this gap, we introduce Micro-Rotated-GPTQ (MR-GPTQ), a variant of the classic GPTQ quantization algorithm that tailors the quantization process to FP4's unique properties, by using block-wise Hadamard transforms and format-specific optimizations. We support our proposal with a set of high-performance GPU kernels that enable the MR-GPTQ format with negligible overhead, by rotation fusion into the weights, and fast online computation of the activations. This leads to speedups vs. FP16 of up to 3.6x layer-wise, and 2.2x end-to-end on NVIDIA B200, and of 6x layer-wise and 4x end-to-end on RTX5090. Our extensive empirical evaluation demonstrates that MR-GPTQ matches or outperforms state-of-the-art accuracy, significantly boosting MXFP4, to the point where it nears that of NVFP4. We conclude that, while FP4 is not an automatic upgrade over INT4, format-specialized methods like MR-GPTQ can unlock a new frontier of accuracy-performance trade-offs.

For autoregressive (AR) modeling of high-resolution images, vector quantization (VQ) represents an image as a sequence of discrete codes. A short sequence length is important for an AR model to reduce its computational costs to consider long-range interactions of codes. However, we postulate that previous VQ cannot shorten the code sequence and generate high-fidelity images together in terms of the rate-distortion trade-off. In this study, we propose the two-stage framework, which consists of Residual-Quantized VAE (RQ-VAE) and RQ-Transformer, to effectively generate high-resolution images. Given a fixed codebook size, RQ-VAE can precisely approximate a feature map of an image and represent the image as a stacked map of discrete codes. Then, RQ-Transformer learns to predict the quantized feature vector at the next position by predicting the next stack of codes. Thanks to the precise approximation of RQ-VAE, we can represent a 256times256 image as 8times8 resolution of the feature map, and RQ-Transformer can efficiently reduce the computational costs. Consequently, our framework outperforms the existing AR models on various benchmarks of unconditional and conditional image generation. Our approach also has a significantly faster sampling speed than previous AR models to generate high-quality images.

Human motion, inherently continuous and dynamic, presents significant challenges for generative models. Despite their dominance, discrete quantization methods, such as VQ-VAEs, suffer from inherent limitations, including restricted expressiveness and frame-wise noise artifacts. Continuous approaches, while producing smoother and more natural motions, often falter due to high-dimensional complexity and limited training data. To resolve this "discord" between discrete and continuous representations, we introduce DisCoRD: Discrete Tokens to Continuous Motion via Rectified Flow Decoding, a novel method that decodes discrete motion tokens into continuous motion through rectified flow. By employing an iterative refinement process in the continuous space, DisCoRD captures fine-grained dynamics and ensures smoother and more natural motions. Compatible with any discrete-based framework, our method enhances naturalness without compromising faithfulness to the conditioning signals. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that DisCoRD achieves state-of-the-art performance, with FID of 0.032 on HumanML3D and 0.169 on KIT-ML. These results solidify DisCoRD as a robust solution for bridging the divide between discrete efficiency and continuous realism. Our project page is available at: https://whwjdqls.github.io/discord.github.io/.

The intrinsic rotation invariance lies at the core of matching point clouds with handcrafted descriptors. However, it is widely despised by recent deep matchers that obtain the rotation invariance extrinsically via data augmentation. As the finite number of augmented rotations can never span the continuous SO(3) space, these methods usually show instability when facing rotations that are rarely seen. To this end, we introduce RoITr, a Rotation-Invariant Transformer to cope with the pose variations in the point cloud matching task. We contribute both on the local and global levels. Starting from the local level, we introduce an attention mechanism embedded with Point Pair Feature (PPF)-based coordinates to describe the pose-invariant geometry, upon which a novel attention-based encoder-decoder architecture is constructed. We further propose a global transformer with rotation-invariant cross-frame spatial awareness learned by the self-attention mechanism, which significantly improves the feature distinctiveness and makes the model robust with respect to the low overlap. Experiments are conducted on both the rigid and non-rigid public benchmarks, where RoITr outperforms all the state-of-the-art models by a considerable margin in the low-overlapping scenarios. Especially when the rotations are enlarged on the challenging 3DLoMatch benchmark, RoITr surpasses the existing methods by at least 13 and 5 percentage points in terms of Inlier Ratio and Registration Recall, respectively.

Diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in image synthesis and related generative tasks. Nevertheless, their practicality for low-latency real-world applications is constrained by substantial computational costs and latency issues. Quantization is a dominant way to compress and accelerate diffusion models, where post-training quantization (PTQ) and quantization-aware training (QAT) are two main approaches, each bearing its own properties. While PTQ exhibits efficiency in terms of both time and data usage, it may lead to diminished performance in low bit-width. On the other hand, QAT can alleviate performance degradation but comes with substantial demands on computational and data resources. To capitalize on the advantages while avoiding their respective drawbacks, we introduce a data-free and parameter-efficient fine-tuning framework for low-bit diffusion models, dubbed EfficientDM, to achieve QAT-level performance with PTQ-like efficiency. Specifically, we propose a quantization-aware variant of the low-rank adapter (QALoRA) that can be merged with model weights and jointly quantized to low bit-width. The fine-tuning process distills the denoising capabilities of the full-precision model into its quantized counterpart, eliminating the requirement for training data. We also introduce scale-aware optimization and employ temporal learned step-size quantization to further enhance performance. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms previous PTQ-based diffusion models while maintaining similar time and data efficiency. Specifically, there is only a marginal 0.05 sFID increase when quantizing both weights and activations of LDM-4 to 4-bit on ImageNet 256x256. Compared to QAT-based methods, our EfficientDM also boasts a 16.2x faster quantization speed with comparable generation quality.

We present All-Pairs Multi-Field Transforms (AMT), a new network architecture for video frame interpolation. It is based on two essential designs. First, we build bidirectional correlation volumes for all pairs of pixels, and use the predicted bilateral flows to retrieve correlations for updating both flows and the interpolated content feature. Second, we derive multiple groups of fine-grained flow fields from one pair of updated coarse flows for performing backward warping on the input frames separately. Combining these two designs enables us to generate promising task-oriented flows and reduce the difficulties in modeling large motions and handling occluded areas during frame interpolation. These qualities promote our model to achieve state-of-the-art performance on various benchmarks with high efficiency. Moreover, our convolution-based model competes favorably compared to Transformer-based models in terms of accuracy and efficiency. Our code is available at https://github.com/MCG-NKU/AMT.

Large Language Models (LLMs) suffer severe performance degradation when facing extremely low-bit (sub 2-bit) quantization. Several existing sub 2-bit post-training quantization (PTQ) methods utilize a mix-precision scheme by leveraging an unstructured fine-grained mask to explicitly distinguish salient weights, while which introduces an extra 1-bit or more per weight. To explore the real limit of PTQ, we propose an extremely low-bit PTQ method called PTQ1.61, which enables weight quantization to 1.61-bit for the first time. Specifically, we first introduce a one-dimensional structured mask with negligibly additional 0.0002-bit per weight based on input activations from the perspective of reducing the upper bound of quantization error to allocate corresponding salient weight channels to 4-bit. For non-salient channels binarization, an efficient block-wise scaling factors optimization framework is then presented to take implicit row-wise correlations and angular biases into account. Different from prior works that concentrate on adjusting quantization methodologies, we further propose a novel paradigm called quantization preprocessing, where we argue that transforming the weight distribution of the pretrained model before quantization can alleviate the difficulty in per-channel extremely low-bit PTQ. Extensive experiments indicate our PTQ1.61 achieves state-of-the-art performance in extremely low-bit quantization. Codes are available at https://github.com/zjq0455/PTQ1.61.

We present an approach to estimating camera rotation in crowded, real-world scenes from handheld monocular video. While camera rotation estimation is a well-studied problem, no previous methods exhibit both high accuracy and acceptable speed in this setting. Because the setting is not addressed well by other datasets, we provide a new dataset and benchmark, with high-accuracy, rigorously verified ground truth, on 17 video sequences. Methods developed for wide baseline stereo (e.g., 5-point methods) perform poorly on monocular video. On the other hand, methods used in autonomous driving (e.g., SLAM) leverage specific sensor setups, specific motion models, or local optimization strategies (lagging batch processing) and do not generalize well to handheld video. Finally, for dynamic scenes, commonly used robustification techniques like RANSAC require large numbers of iterations, and become prohibitively slow. We introduce a novel generalization of the Hough transform on SO(3) to efficiently and robustly find the camera rotation most compatible with optical flow. Among comparably fast methods, ours reduces error by almost 50\% over the next best, and is more accurate than any method, irrespective of speed. This represents a strong new performance point for crowded scenes, an important setting for computer vision. The code and the dataset are available at https://fabiendelattre.com/robust-rotation-estimation.

We propose a simple approach for memory-efficient adaptation of pretrained language models. Our approach uses an iterative algorithm to decompose each pretrained matrix into a high-precision low-rank component and a memory-efficient quantized component. During finetuning, the quantized component remains fixed and only the low-rank component is updated. We present an integer linear programming formulation of the quantization component which enables dynamic configuration of quantization parameters (e.g., bit-width, block size) for each matrix given an overall target memory budget. We further explore a data-aware version of the algorithm which uses an approximation of the Fisher information matrix to weight the reconstruction objective during matrix decomposition. Experiments on adapting RoBERTa and LLaMA-2 (7B and 70B) demonstrate that our low-rank plus quantized matrix decomposition approach (LQ-LoRA) outperforms strong QLoRA and GPTQ-LoRA baselines and moreover enables more aggressive quantization. For example, on the OpenAssistant benchmark LQ-LoRA is able to learn a 2.5-bit LLaMA-2 model that is competitive with a model finetuned with 4-bit QLoRA. When finetuned on a language modeling calibration dataset, LQ-LoRA can also be used for model compression; in this setting our 2.75-bit LLaMA-2-70B model (which has 2.85 bits on average when including the low-rank components and requires 27GB of GPU memory) is competitive with the original model in full precision.

Supervised fine-tuning is a standard method for adapting pre-trained large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks. Quantization has been recently studied as a post-training technique for efficient LLM deployment. To obtain quantized fine-tuned LLMs, conventional pipelines would first fine-tune the pre-trained models, followed by post-training quantization. This often yields suboptimal performance as it fails to leverage the synergy between fine-tuning and quantization. To effectively realize low-bit quantization of weights, activations and KV caches in LLMs, we propose an algorithm named Rotated Straight-Through-Estimator (RoSTE), which combines quantization-aware supervised fine-tuning (QA-SFT) with an adaptive rotation strategy that identifies an effective rotation configuration to reduce activation outliers. We provide theoretical insights on RoSTE by analyzing its prediction error when applied to an overparameterized least square quantized training problem. Our findings reveal that the prediction error is directly proportional to the quantization error of the converged weights, which can be effectively managed through an optimized rotation configuration. Experiments on Pythia, Qwen and Llama models of different sizes demonstrate the effectiveness of RoSTE. Compared to existing post-SFT quantization baselines, our method consistently achieves superior performances across various tasks and different LLM architectures. Our code is available at https://github.com/OptimAI-Lab/RoSTE.

Vector quantization (VQ) transforms continuous image features into discrete representations, providing compressed, tokenized inputs for generative models. However, VQ-based frameworks suffer from several issues, such as non-smooth latent spaces, weak alignment between representations before and after quantization, and poor coherence between the continuous and discrete domains. These issues lead to unstable codeword learning and underutilized codebooks, ultimately degrading the performance of both reconstruction and downstream generation tasks. To this end, we propose VAEVQ, which comprises three key components: (1) Variational Latent Quantization (VLQ), replacing the AE with a VAE for quantization to leverage its structured and smooth latent space, thereby facilitating more effective codeword activation; (2) Representation Coherence Strategy (RCS), adaptively modulating the alignment strength between pre- and post-quantization features to enhance consistency and prevent overfitting to noise; and (3) Distribution Consistency Regularization (DCR), aligning the entire codebook distribution with the continuous latent distribution to improve utilization. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that VAEVQ outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

The diffusion model has gained popularity in vision applications due to its remarkable generative performance and versatility. However, high storage and computation demands, resulting from the model size and iterative generation, hinder its use on mobile devices. Existing quantization techniques struggle to maintain performance even in 8-bit precision due to the diffusion model's unique property of temporal variation in activation. We introduce a novel quantization method that dynamically adjusts the quantization interval based on time step information, significantly improving output quality. Unlike conventional dynamic quantization techniques, our approach has no computational overhead during inference and is compatible with both post-training quantization (PTQ) and quantization-aware training (QAT). Our extensive experiments demonstrate substantial improvements in output quality with the quantized diffusion model across various datasets.

While vision transformers (ViTs) have shown great potential in computer vision tasks, their intense computation and memory requirements pose challenges for practical applications. Existing post-training quantization methods leverage value redistribution or specialized quantizers to address the non-normal distribution in ViTs. However, without considering the asymmetry in activations and relying on hand-crafted settings, these methods often struggle to maintain performance under low-bit quantization. To overcome these challenges, we introduce SmoothQuant with bias term (SQ-b) to alleviate the asymmetry issue and reduce the clamping loss. We also introduce optimal scaling factor ratio search (OPT-m) to determine quantization parameters by a data-dependent mechanism automatically. To further enhance the compressibility, we incorporate the above-mentioned techniques and propose a mixed-precision post-training quantization framework for vision transformers (MPTQ-ViT). We develop greedy mixed-precision quantization (Greedy MP) to allocate layer-wise bit-width considering both model performance and compressibility. Our experiments on ViT, DeiT, and Swin demonstrate significant accuracy improvements compared with SOTA on the ImageNet dataset. Specifically, our proposed methods achieve accuracy improvements ranging from 0.90% to 23.35% on 4-bit ViTs with single-precision and from 3.82% to 78.14% on 5-bit fully quantized ViTs with mixed-precision.

The generation of smooth and continuous images between domains has recently drawn much attention in image-to-image (I2I) translation. Linear relationship acts as the basic assumption in most existing approaches, while applied to different aspects including features, models or labels. However, the linear assumption is hard to conform with the element dimension increases and suffers from the limit that having to obtain both ends of the line. In this paper, we propose a novel rotation-oriented solution and model the continuous generation with an in-plane rotation over the style representation of an image, achieving a network named RoNet. A rotation module is implanted in the generation network to automatically learn the proper plane while disentangling the content and the style of an image. To encourage realistic texture, we also design a patch-based semantic style loss that learns the different styles of the similar object in different domains. We conduct experiments on forest scenes (where the complex texture makes the generation very challenging), faces, streetscapes and the iphone2dslr task. The results validate the superiority of our method in terms of visual quality and continuity.

Fully quantized training (FQT) accelerates the training of deep neural networks by quantizing the activations, weights, and gradients into lower precision. To explore the ultimate limit of FQT (the lowest achievable precision), we make a first attempt to 1-bit FQT. We provide a theoretical analysis of FQT based on Adam and SGD, revealing that the gradient variance influences the convergence of FQT. Building on these theoretical results, we introduce an Activation Gradient Pruning (AGP) strategy. The strategy leverages the heterogeneity of gradients by pruning less informative gradients and enhancing the numerical precision of remaining gradients to mitigate gradient variance. Additionally, we propose Sample Channel joint Quantization (SCQ), which utilizes different quantization strategies in the computation of weight gradients and activation gradients to ensure that the method is friendly to low-bitwidth hardware. Finally, we present a framework to deploy our algorithm. For fine-tuning VGGNet-16 and ResNet-18 on multiple datasets, our algorithm achieves an average accuracy improvement of approximately 6%, compared to per-sample quantization. Moreover, our training speedup can reach a maximum of 5.13x compared to full precision training.

Self-supervised learning converts raw perceptual data such as images to a compact space where simple Euclidean distances measure meaningful variations in data. In this paper, we extend this formulation by adding additional geometric structure to the embedding space by enforcing transformations of input space to correspond to simple (i.e., linear) transformations of embedding space. Specifically, in the contrastive learning setting, we introduce an equivariance objective and theoretically prove that its minima forces augmentations on input space to correspond to rotations on the spherical embedding space. We show that merely combining our equivariant loss with a non-collapse term results in non-trivial representations, without requiring invariance to data augmentations. Optimal performance is achieved by also encouraging approximate invariance, where input augmentations correspond to small rotations. Our method, CARE: Contrastive Augmentation-induced Rotational Equivariance, leads to improved performance on downstream tasks, and ensures sensitivity in embedding space to important variations in data (e.g., color) that standard contrastive methods do not achieve. Code is available at https://github.com/Sharut/CARE.

Diffusion models have achieved significant visual generation quality. However, their significant computational and memory costs pose challenge for their application on resource-constrained mobile devices or even desktop GPUs. Recent few-step diffusion models reduces the inference time by reducing the denoising steps. However, their memory consumptions are still excessive. The Post Training Quantization (PTQ) replaces high bit-width FP representation with low-bit integer values (INT4/8) , which is an effective and efficient technique to reduce the memory cost. However, when applying to few-step diffusion models, existing quantization methods face challenges in preserving both the image quality and text alignment. To address this issue, we propose an mixed-precision quantization framework - MixDQ. Firstly, We design specialized BOS-aware quantization method for highly sensitive text embedding quantization. Then, we conduct metric-decoupled sensitivity analysis to measure the sensitivity of each layer. Finally, we develop an integer-programming-based method to conduct bit-width allocation. While existing quantization methods fall short at W8A8, MixDQ could achieve W8A8 without performance loss, and W4A8 with negligible visual degradation. Compared with FP16, we achieve 3-4x reduction in model size and memory cost, and 1.45x latency speedup.

The Diffusion Transformers Models (DiTs) have transitioned the network architecture from traditional UNets to transformers, demonstrating exceptional capabilities in image generation. Although DiTs have been widely applied to high-definition video generation tasks, their large parameter size hinders inference on edge devices. Vector quantization (VQ) can decompose model weight into a codebook and assignments, allowing extreme weight quantization and significantly reducing memory usage. In this paper, we propose VQ4DiT, a fast post-training vector quantization method for DiTs. We found that traditional VQ methods calibrate only the codebook without calibrating the assignments. This leads to weight sub-vectors being incorrectly assigned to the same assignment, providing inconsistent gradients to the codebook and resulting in a suboptimal result. To address this challenge, VQ4DiT calculates the candidate assignment set for each weight sub-vector based on Euclidean distance and reconstructs the sub-vector based on the weighted average. Then, using the zero-data and block-wise calibration method, the optimal assignment from the set is efficiently selected while calibrating the codebook. VQ4DiT quantizes a DiT XL/2 model on a single NVIDIA A100 GPU within 20 minutes to 5 hours depending on the different quantization settings. Experiments show that VQ4DiT establishes a new state-of-the-art in model size and performance trade-offs, quantizing weights to 2-bit precision while retaining acceptable image generation quality.

We introduce GPTQv2, a novel finetuning-free quantization method for compressing large-scale transformer architectures. Unlike the previous GPTQ method, which independently calibrates each layer, we always match the quantized layer's output to the exact output in the full-precision model, resulting in a scheme that we call asymmetric calibration. Such a scheme can effectively reduce the quantization error accumulated in previous layers. We analyze this problem using optimal brain compression to derive a close-formed solution. The new solution explicitly minimizes the quantization error as well as the accumulated asymmetry error. Furthermore, we utilize various techniques to parallelize the solution calculation, including channel parallelization, neuron decomposition, and Cholesky reformulation for matrix fusion. As a result, GPTQv2 is easy to implement, simply using 20 more lines of code than GPTQ but improving its performance under low-bit quantization. Remarkably, on a single GPU, we quantize a 405B language transformer as well as EVA-02 the rank first vision transformer that achieves 90% pretraining Imagenet accuracy. Code is available at github.com/Intelligent-Computing-Lab-Yale/GPTQv2.

Diffusion models have been proven highly effective at generating high-quality images. However, as these models grow larger, they require significantly more memory and suffer from higher latency, posing substantial challenges for deployment. In this work, we aim to accelerate diffusion models by quantizing their weights and activations to 4 bits. At such an aggressive level, both weights and activations are highly sensitive, where conventional post-training quantization methods for large language models like smoothing become insufficient. To overcome this limitation, we propose SVDQuant, a new 4-bit quantization paradigm. Different from smoothing which redistributes outliers between weights and activations, our approach absorbs these outliers using a low-rank branch. We first consolidate the outliers by shifting them from activations to weights, then employ a high-precision low-rank branch to take in the weight outliers with Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). This process eases the quantization on both sides. However, na\"{\i}vely running the low-rank branch independently incurs significant overhead due to extra data movement of activations, negating the quantization speedup. To address this, we co-design an inference engine Nunchaku that fuses the kernels of the low-rank branch into those of the low-bit branch to cut off redundant memory access. It can also seamlessly support off-the-shelf low-rank adapters (LoRAs) without the need for re-quantization. Extensive experiments on SDXL, PixArt-Sigma, and FLUX.1 validate the effectiveness of SVDQuant in preserving image quality. We reduce the memory usage for the 12B FLUX.1 models by 3.5times, achieving 3.0times speedup over the 4-bit weight-only quantized baseline on the 16GB laptop 4090 GPU, paving the way for more interactive applications on PCs. Our quantization library and inference engine are open-sourced.

We propose to replace vector quantization (VQ) in the latent representation of VQ-VAEs with a simple scheme termed finite scalar quantization (FSQ), where we project the VAE representation down to a few dimensions (typically less than 10). Each dimension is quantized to a small set of fixed values, leading to an (implicit) codebook given by the product of these sets. By appropriately choosing the number of dimensions and values each dimension can take, we obtain the same codebook size as in VQ. On top of such discrete representations, we can train the same models that have been trained on VQ-VAE representations. For example, autoregressive and masked transformer models for image generation, multimodal generation, and dense prediction computer vision tasks. Concretely, we employ FSQ with MaskGIT for image generation, and with UViM for depth estimation, colorization, and panoptic segmentation. Despite the much simpler design of FSQ, we obtain competitive performance in all these tasks. We emphasize that FSQ does not suffer from codebook collapse and does not need the complex machinery employed in VQ (commitment losses, codebook reseeding, code splitting, entropy penalties, etc.) to learn expressive discrete representations.

Quantization is a promising approach for reducing the inference time and memory footprint of neural networks. However, most existing quantization methods require access to the original training dataset for retraining during quantization. This is often not possible for applications with sensitive or proprietary data, e.g., due to privacy and security concerns. Existing zero-shot quantization methods use different heuristics to address this, but they result in poor performance, especially when quantizing to ultra-low precision. Here, we propose ZeroQ , a novel zero-shot quantization framework to address this. ZeroQ enables mixed-precision quantization without any access to the training or validation data. This is achieved by optimizing for a Distilled Dataset, which is engineered to match the statistics of batch normalization across different layers of the network. ZeroQ supports both uniform and mixed-precision quantization. For the latter, we introduce a novel Pareto frontier based method to automatically determine the mixed-precision bit setting for all layers, with no manual search involved. We extensively test our proposed method on a diverse set of models, including ResNet18/50/152, MobileNetV2, ShuffleNet, SqueezeNext, and InceptionV3 on ImageNet, as well as RetinaNet-ResNet50 on the Microsoft COCO dataset. In particular, we show that ZeroQ can achieve 1.71\% higher accuracy on MobileNetV2, as compared to the recently proposed DFQ method. Importantly, ZeroQ has a very low computational overhead, and it can finish the entire quantization process in less than 30s (0.5\% of one epoch training time of ResNet50 on ImageNet). We have open-sourced the ZeroQ frameworkhttps://github.com/amirgholami/ZeroQ.

This work studies post-training parameter quantization in large language models (LLMs). We introduce quantization with incoherence processing (QuIP), a new method based on the insight that quantization benefits from incoherent weight and Hessian matrices, i.e., from the weights and the directions in which it is important to round them accurately being unaligned with the coordinate axes. QuIP consists of two steps: (1) an adaptive rounding procedure minimizing a quadratic proxy objective; (2) efficient pre- and post-processing that ensures weight and Hessian incoherence via multiplication by random orthogonal matrices. We complement QuIP with the first theoretical analysis for an LLM-scale quantization algorithm, and show that our theory also applies to an existing method, OPTQ. Empirically, we find that our incoherence preprocessing improves several existing quantization algorithms and yields the first LLM quantization methods that produce viable results using only two bits per weight. Our code can be found at https://github.com/jerry-chee/QuIP .

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a promising framework for novel view synthesis, boasting rapid rendering speed with high fidelity. However, the substantial Gaussians and their associated attributes necessitate effective compression techniques. Nevertheless, the sparse and unorganized nature of the point cloud of Gaussians (or anchors in our paper) presents challenges for compression. To achieve a compact size, we propose HAC++, which leverages the relationships between unorganized anchors and a structured hash grid, utilizing their mutual information for context modeling. Additionally, HAC++ captures intra-anchor contextual relationships to further enhance compression performance. To facilitate entropy coding, we utilize Gaussian distributions to precisely estimate the probability of each quantized attribute, where an adaptive quantization module is proposed to enable high-precision quantization of these attributes for improved fidelity restoration. Moreover, we incorporate an adaptive masking strategy to eliminate invalid Gaussians and anchors. Overall, HAC++ achieves a remarkable size reduction of over 100X compared to vanilla 3DGS when averaged on all datasets, while simultaneously improving fidelity. It also delivers more than 20X size reduction compared to Scaffold-GS. Our code is available at https://github.com/YihangChen-ee/HAC-plus.

Existing vector quantization (VQ) based autoregressive models follow a two-stage generation paradigm that first learns a codebook to encode images as discrete codes, and then completes generation based on the learned codebook. However, they encode fixed-size image regions into fixed-length codes and ignore their naturally different information densities, which results in insufficiency in important regions and redundancy in unimportant ones, and finally degrades the generation quality and speed. Moreover, the fixed-length coding leads to an unnatural raster-scan autoregressive generation. To address the problem, we propose a novel two-stage framework: (1) Dynamic-Quantization VAE (DQ-VAE) which encodes image regions into variable-length codes based on their information densities for an accurate and compact code representation. (2) DQ-Transformer which thereby generates images autoregressively from coarse-grained (smooth regions with fewer codes) to fine-grained (details regions with more codes) by modeling the position and content of codes in each granularity alternately, through a novel stacked-transformer architecture and shared-content, non-shared position input layers designs. Comprehensive experiments on various generation tasks validate our superiorities in both effectiveness and efficiency. Code will be released at https://github.com/CrossmodalGroup/DynamicVectorQuantization.

Quantization has become a crucial step for the efficient deployment of deep neural networks, where floating point operations are converted to simpler fixed point operations. In its most naive form, it simply consists in a combination of scaling and rounding transformations, leading to either a limited compression rate or a significant accuracy drop. Recently, Gradient-based post-training quantization (GPTQ) methods appears to be constitute a suitable trade-off between such simple methods and more powerful, yet expensive Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) approaches, particularly when attempting to quantize LLMs, where scalability of the quantization process is of paramount importance. GPTQ essentially consists in learning the rounding operation using a small calibration set. In this work, we challenge common choices in GPTQ methods. In particular, we show that the process is, to a certain extent, robust to a number of variables (weight selection, feature augmentation, choice of calibration set). More importantly, we derive a number of best practices for designing more efficient and scalable GPTQ methods, regarding the problem formulation (loss, degrees of freedom, use of non-uniform quantization schemes) or optimization process (choice of variable and optimizer). Lastly, we propose a novel importance-based mixed-precision technique. Those guidelines lead to significant performance improvements on all the tested state-of-the-art GPTQ methods and networks (e.g. +6.819 points on ViT for 4-bit quantization), paving the way for the design of scalable, yet effective quantization methods.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities but typically require extensive computational resources and memory for inference. Post-training quantization (PTQ) can effectively reduce these demands by storing weights in lower bit-width formats. However, standard uniform quantization often leads to notable performance degradation, particularly in low-bit scenarios. In this work, we introduce a Grouped Lattice Vector Quantization (GLVQ) framework that assigns each group of weights a customized lattice codebook, defined by a learnable generation matrix. To address the non-differentiability of the quantization process, we adopt Babai rounding to approximate nearest-lattice-point search during training, which enables stable optimization of the generation matrices. Once trained, decoding reduces to a simple matrix-vector multiplication, yielding an efficient and practical quantization pipeline. Experiments on multiple benchmarks show that our approach achieves a better trade-off between model size and accuracy compared to existing post-training quantization baselines, highlighting its effectiveness in deploying large models under stringent resource constraints. Our source code is available on GitHub repository: https://github.com/xzhang9308/GLVQ.

The complicated architecture and high training cost of vision transformers urge the exploration of post-training quantization. However, the heavy-tailed distribution of vision transformer activations hinders the effectiveness of previous post-training quantization methods, even with advanced quantizer designs. Instead of tuning the quantizer to better fit the complicated activation distribution, this paper proposes NoisyQuant, a quantizer-agnostic enhancement for the post-training activation quantization performance of vision transformers. We make a surprising theoretical discovery that for a given quantizer, adding a fixed Uniform noisy bias to the values being quantized can significantly reduce the quantization error under provable conditions. Building on the theoretical insight, NoisyQuant achieves the first success on actively altering the heavy-tailed activation distribution with additive noisy bias to fit a given quantizer. Extensive experiments show NoisyQuant largely improves the post-training quantization performance of vision transformer with minimal computation overhead. For instance, on linear uniform 6-bit activation quantization, NoisyQuant improves SOTA top-1 accuracy on ImageNet by up to 1.7%, 1.1% and 0.5% for ViT, DeiT, and Swin Transformer respectively, achieving on-par or even higher performance than previous nonlinear, mixed-precision quantization.

Since 2023, Vector Quantization (VQ)-based discrete generation methods have rapidly dominated human motion generation, primarily surpassing diffusion-based continuous generation methods in standard performance metrics. However, VQ-based methods have inherent limitations. Representing continuous motion data as limited discrete tokens leads to inevitable information loss, reduces the diversity of generated motions, and restricts their ability to function effectively as motion priors or generation guidance. In contrast, the continuous space generation nature of diffusion-based methods makes them well-suited to address these limitations and with even potential for model scalability. In this work, we systematically investigate why current VQ-based methods perform well and explore the limitations of existing diffusion-based methods from the perspective of motion data representation and distribution. Drawing on these insights, we preserve the inherent strengths of a diffusion-based human motion generation model and gradually optimize it with inspiration from VQ-based approaches. Our approach introduces a human motion diffusion model enabled to perform bidirectional masked autoregression, optimized with a reformed data representation and distribution. Additionally, we also propose more robust evaluation methods to fairly assess different-based methods. Extensive experiments on benchmark human motion generation datasets demonstrate that our method excels previous methods and achieves state-of-the-art performances.

Lately, post-training quantization methods have gained considerable attention, as they are simple to use, and require only a small unlabeled calibration set. This small dataset cannot be used to fine-tune the model without significant over-fitting. Instead, these methods only use the calibration set to set the activations' dynamic ranges. However, such methods always resulted in significant accuracy degradation, when used below 8-bits (except on small datasets). Here we aim to break the 8-bit barrier. To this end, we minimize the quantization errors of each layer separately by optimizing its parameters over the calibration set. We empirically demonstrate that this approach is: (1) much less susceptible to over-fitting than the standard fine-tuning approaches, and can be used even on a very small calibration set; and (2) more powerful than previous methods, which only set the activations' dynamic ranges. Furthermore, we demonstrate how to optimally allocate the bit-widths for each layer, while constraining accuracy degradation or model compression by proposing a novel integer programming formulation. Finally, we suggest model global statistics tuning, to correct biases introduced during quantization. Together, these methods yield state-of-the-art results for both vision and text models. For instance, on ResNet50, we obtain less than 1\% accuracy degradation --- with 4-bit weights and activations in all layers, but the smallest two. We open-sourced our code.

The massive interest in deep neural networks (DNNs) for both computer vision and natural language processing has been sparked by the growth in computational power. However, this led to an increase in the memory footprint, to a point where it can be challenging to simply load a model on commodity devices such as mobile phones. To address this limitation, quantization is a favored solution as it maps high precision tensors to a low precision, memory efficient format. In terms of memory footprint reduction, its most effective variants are based on codebooks. These methods, however, suffer from two limitations. First, they either define a single codebook for each tensor, or use a memory-expensive mapping to multiple codebooks. Second, gradient descent optimization of the mapping favors jumps toward extreme values, hence not defining a proximal search. In this work, we propose to address these two limitations. First, we initially group similarly distributed neurons and leverage the re-ordered structure to either apply different scale factors to the different groups, or map weights that fall in these groups to several codebooks, without any mapping overhead. Second, stemming from this initialization, we propose a joint learning of the codebook and weight mappings that bears similarities with recent gradient-based post-training quantization techniques. Third, drawing estimation from straight-through estimation techniques, we introduce a novel gradient update definition to enable a proximal search of the codebooks and their mappings. The proposed jointly learnable codebooks and mappings (JLCM) method allows a very efficient approximation of any DNN: as such, a Llama 7B can be compressed down to 2Go and loaded on 5-year-old smartphones.

Quantization is a key technique to reduce network size and computational complexity by representing the network parameters with a lower precision. Traditional quantization methods rely on access to original training data, which is often restricted due to privacy concerns or security challenges. Zero-shot Quantization (ZSQ) addresses this by using synthetic data generated from pre-trained models, eliminating the need for real training data. Recently, ZSQ has been extended to object detection. However, existing methods use unlabeled task-agnostic synthetic images that lack the specific information required for object detection, leading to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose a novel task-specific ZSQ framework for object detection networks, which consists of two main stages. First, we introduce a bounding box and category sampling strategy to synthesize a task-specific calibration set from the pre-trained network, reconstructing object locations, sizes, and category distributions without any prior knowledge. Second, we integrate task-specific training into the knowledge distillation process to restore the performance of quantized detection networks. Extensive experiments conducted on the MS-COCO and Pascal VOC datasets demonstrate the efficiency and state-of-the-art performance of our method. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/DFQ-Dojo/dfq-toolkit .

Although deep generative models have gained a lot of attention, most of the existing works are designed for unimodal generation. In this paper, we explore a new method for unconditional image-text pair generation. We design Multimodal Cross-Quantization VAE (MXQ-VAE), a novel vector quantizer for joint image-text representations, with which we discover that a joint image-text representation space is effective for semantically consistent image-text pair generation. To learn a multimodal semantic correlation in a quantized space, we combine VQ-VAE with a Transformer encoder and apply an input masking strategy. Specifically, MXQ-VAE accepts a masked image-text pair as input and learns a quantized joint representation space, so that the input can be converted to a unified code sequence, then we perform unconditional image-text pair generation with the code sequence. Extensive experiments show the correlation between the quantized joint space and the multimodal generation capability on synthetic and real-world datasets. In addition, we demonstrate the superiority of our approach in these two aspects over several baselines. The source code is publicly available at: https://github.com/ttumyche/MXQ-VAE.

Vision transformers (ViTs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across various visual tasks. However, ViT models suffer from substantial computational and memory requirements, making it challenging to deploy them on resource-constrained platforms. Quantization is a popular approach for reducing model size, but most studies mainly focus on equal bit-width quantization for the entire network, resulting in sub-optimal solutions. While there are few works on mixed precision quantization (MPQ) for ViTs, they typically rely on search space-based methods or employ mixed precision arbitrarily. In this paper, we introduce LRP-QViT, an explainability-based method for assigning mixed-precision bit allocations to different layers based on their importance during classification. Specifically, to measure the contribution score of each layer in predicting the target class, we employ the Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP) method. LRP assigns local relevance at the output layer and propagates it through all layers, distributing the relevance until it reaches the input layers. These relevance scores serve as indicators for computing the layer contribution score. Additionally, we have introduced a clipped channel-wise quantization aimed at eliminating outliers from post-LayerNorm activations to alleviate severe inter-channel variations. To validate and assess our approach, we employ LRP-QViT across ViT, DeiT, and Swin transformer models on various datasets. Our experimental findings demonstrate that both our fixed-bit and mixed-bit post-training quantization methods surpass existing models in the context of 4-bit and 6-bit quantization.

Despite the widespread use of text-to-image diffusion models across various tasks, their computational and memory demands limit practical applications. To mitigate this issue, quantization of diffusion models has been explored. It reduces memory usage and computational costs by compressing weights and activations into lower-bit formats. However, existing methods often struggle to preserve both image quality and text-image alignment, particularly in lower-bit(< 8bits) quantization. In this paper, we analyze the challenges associated with quantizing text-to-image diffusion models from a distributional perspective. Our analysis reveals that activation outliers play a crucial role in determining image quality. Additionally, we identify distinctive patterns in cross-attention scores, which significantly affects text-image alignment. To address these challenges, we propose Distribution-aware Group Quantization (DGQ), a method that identifies and adaptively handles pixel-wise and channel-wise outliers to preserve image quality. Furthermore, DGQ applies prompt-specific logarithmic quantization scales to maintain text-image alignment. Our method demonstrates remarkable performance on datasets such as MS-COCO and PartiPrompts. We are the first to successfully achieve low-bit quantization of text-to-image diffusion models without requiring additional fine-tuning of weight quantization parameters. Code is available at https://github.com/ugonfor/DGQ.

Quantizing large language models (LLMs) presents significant challenges, primarily due to outlier activations that compromise the efficiency of low-bit representation. Traditional approaches mainly focus on solving Normal Outliers-activations with consistently high magnitudes across all tokens. However, these techniques falter when dealing with Massive Outliers, which are significantly higher in value and often cause substantial performance losses during low-bit quantization. In this study, we propose DuQuant, an innovative quantization strategy employing rotation and permutation transformations to more effectively eliminate both types of outliers. Initially, DuQuant constructs rotation matrices informed by specific outlier dimensions, redistributing these outliers across adjacent channels within different rotation blocks. Subsequently, a zigzag permutation is applied to ensure a balanced distribution of outliers among blocks, minimizing block-wise variance. An additional rotation further enhances the smoothness of the activation landscape, thereby improving model performance. DuQuant streamlines the quantization process and demonstrates superior outlier management, achieving top-tier results in multiple tasks with various LLM architectures even under 4-bit weight-activation quantization. Our code is available at https://github.com/Hsu1023/DuQuant.

In this paper, we present a method for unconstrained end-to-end head pose estimation. We address the problem of ambiguous rotation labels by introducing the rotation matrix formalism for our ground truth data and propose a continuous 6D rotation matrix representation for efficient and robust direct regression. This way, our method can learn the full rotation appearance which is contrary to previous approaches that restrict the pose prediction to a narrow-angle for satisfactory results. In addition, we propose a geodesic distance-based loss to penalize our network with respect to the SO(3) manifold geometry. Experiments on the public AFLW2000 and BIWI datasets demonstrate that our proposed method significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods by up to 20\%. We open-source our training and testing code along with our pre-trained models: https://github.com/thohemp/6DRepNet.

Unsupervised learning of depth and ego-motion, two fundamental 3D perception tasks, has made significant strides in recent years. However, most methods treat ego-motion as an auxiliary task, either mixing all motion types or excluding depth-independent rotational motions in supervision. Such designs limit the incorporation of strong geometric constraints, reducing reliability and robustness under diverse conditions. This study introduces a discriminative treatment of motion components, leveraging the geometric regularities of their respective rigid flows to benefit both depth and ego-motion estimation. Given consecutive video frames, network outputs first align the optical axes and imaging planes of the source and target cameras. Optical flows between frames are transformed through these alignments, and deviations are quantified to impose geometric constraints individually on each ego-motion component, enabling more targeted refinement. These alignments further reformulate the joint learning process into coaxial and coplanar forms, where depth and each translation component can be mutually derived through closed-form geometric relationships, introducing complementary constraints that improve depth robustness. DiMoDE, a general depth and ego-motion joint learning framework incorporating these designs, achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple public datasets and a newly collected diverse real-world dataset, particularly under challenging conditions. Our source code will be publicly available at mias.group/DiMoDE upon publication.

Current model quantization methods have shown their promising capability in reducing storage space and computation complexity. However, due to the diversity of quantization forms supported by different hardware, one limitation of existing solutions is that usually require repeated optimization for different scenarios. How to construct a model with flexible quantization forms has been less studied. In this paper, we explore a one-shot network quantization regime, named Elastic Quantization Neural Networks (EQ-Net), which aims to train a robust weight-sharing quantization supernet. First of all, we propose an elastic quantization space (including elastic bit-width, granularity, and symmetry) to adapt to various mainstream quantitative forms. Secondly, we propose the Weight Distribution Regularization Loss (WDR-Loss) and Group Progressive Guidance Loss (GPG-Loss) to bridge the inconsistency of the distribution for weights and output logits in the elastic quantization space gap. Lastly, we incorporate genetic algorithms and the proposed Conditional Quantization-Aware Accuracy Predictor (CQAP) as an estimator to quickly search mixed-precision quantized neural networks in supernet. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our EQ-Net is close to or even better than its static counterparts as well as state-of-the-art robust bit-width methods. Code can be available at https://github.com/xuke225/EQ-Net.git{https://github.com/xuke225/EQ-Net}.

Post-training quantization for reducing the storage of deep neural network models has been demonstrated to be an effective way in various tasks. However, low-bit quantization while maintaining model accuracy is a challenging problem. In this paper, we present a range estimation method to improve the quantization performance for post-training quantization. We model the range estimation into an optimization problem of minimizing quantization errors by layer-wise local minima. We prove this problem is locally convex and present an efficient search algorithm to find the optimal solution. We propose the application of the above search algorithm to the transformed weights space to do further improvement in practice. Our experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art performance generally on top-1 accuracy for image classification tasks on the ResNet series models and Inception-v3 model. The experimental results show that the proposed method has almost no loss of top-1 accuracy in 8-bit and 6-bit settings for image classifications, and the accuracy of 4-bit quantization is also significantly improved. The code is available at https://github.com/codeiscommitting/REQuant.

Current low-precision quantization algorithms often have the hidden cost of conversion back and forth from floating point to quantized integer values. This hidden cost limits the latency improvement realized by quantizing Neural Networks. To address this, we present HAWQV3, a novel mixed-precision integer-only quantization framework. The contributions of HAWQV3 are the following: (i) An integer-only inference where the entire computational graph is performed only with integer multiplication, addition, and bit shifting, without any floating point operations or even integer division; (ii) A novel hardware-aware mixed-precision quantization method where the bit-precision is calculated by solving an integer linear programming problem that balances the trade-off between model perturbation and other constraints, e.g., memory footprint and latency; (iii) Direct hardware deployment and open source contribution for 4-bit uniform/mixed-precision quantization in TVM, achieving an average speed up of 1.45times for uniform 4-bit, as compared to uniform 8-bit for ResNet50 on T4 GPUs; and (iv) extensive evaluation of the proposed methods on ResNet18/50 and InceptionV3, for various model compression levels with/without mixed precision. For ResNet50, our INT8 quantization achieves an accuracy of 77.58%, which is 2.68% higher than prior integer-only work, and our mixed-precision INT4/8 quantization can reduce INT8 latency by 23% and still achieve 76.73% accuracy. Our framework and the TVM implementation have been open sourced.

Recently, much attention has been drawn to learning the underlying 3D structures of a scene from monocular videos in a fully self-supervised fashion. One of the most challenging aspects of this task is handling the independently moving objects as they break the rigid-scene assumption. For the first time, we show that pixel positional information can be exploited to learn SVDE (Single View Depth Estimation) from videos. Our proposed moving object (MO) masks, which are induced by shifted positional information (SPI) and referred to as `SPIMO' masks, are very robust and consistently remove the independently moving objects in the scenes, allowing for better learning of SVDE from videos. Additionally, we introduce a new adaptive quantization scheme that assigns the best per-pixel quantization curve for our depth discretization. Finally, we employ existing boosting techniques in a new way to further self-supervise the depth of the moving objects. With these features, our pipeline is robust against moving objects and generalizes well to high-resolution images, even when trained with small patches, yielding state-of-the-art (SOTA) results with almost 8.5x fewer parameters than the previous works that learn from videos. We present extensive experiments on KITTI and CityScapes that show the effectiveness of our method.

Recent interest in point cloud analysis has led rapid progress in designing deep learning methods for 3D models. However, state-of-the-art models are not robust to rotations, which remains an unknown prior to real applications and harms the model performance. In this work, we introduce a novel Patch-wise Rotation-invariant network (PaRot), which achieves rotation invariance via feature disentanglement and produces consistent predictions for samples with arbitrary rotations. Specifically, we design a siamese training module which disentangles rotation invariance and equivariance from patches defined over different scales, e.g., the local geometry and global shape, via a pair of rotations. However, our disentangled invariant feature loses the intrinsic pose information of each patch. To solve this problem, we propose a rotation-invariant geometric relation to restore the relative pose with equivariant information for patches defined over different scales. Utilising the pose information, we propose a hierarchical module which implements intra-scale and inter-scale feature aggregation for 3D shape learning. Moreover, we introduce a pose-aware feature propagation process with the rotation-invariant relative pose information embedded. Experiments show that our disentanglement module extracts high-quality rotation-robust features and the proposed lightweight model achieves competitive results in rotated 3D object classification and part segmentation tasks. Our project page is released at: https://patchrot.github.io/.

Quantization-aware training (QAT) schemes have been shown to achieve near-full precision accuracy. They accomplish this by training a quantized model for multiple epochs. This is computationally expensive, mainly because of the full precision backward pass. On the other hand, post-training quantization (PTQ) schemes do not involve training and are therefore computationally cheap, but they usually result in a significant accuracy drop. We address these challenges by proposing EfQAT, which generalizes both schemes by optimizing only a subset of the parameters of a quantized model. EfQAT starts by applying a PTQ scheme to a pre-trained model and only updates the most critical network parameters while freezing the rest, accelerating the backward pass. We demonstrate the effectiveness of EfQAT on various CNNs and Transformer-based models using different GPUs. Specifically, we show that EfQAT is significantly more accurate than PTQ with little extra compute. Furthermore, EfQAT can accelerate the QAT backward pass between 1.44-1.64x while retaining most accuracy.

While neural networks have been remarkably successful in a wide array of applications, implementing them in resource-constrained hardware remains an area of intense research. By replacing the weights of a neural network with quantized (e.g., 4-bit, or binary) counterparts, massive savings in computation cost, memory, and power consumption are attained. To that end, we generalize a post-training neural-network quantization method, GPFQ, that is based on a greedy path-following mechanism. Among other things, we propose modifications to promote sparsity of the weights, and rigorously analyze the associated error. Additionally, our error analysis expands the results of previous work on GPFQ to handle general quantization alphabets, showing that for quantizing a single-layer network, the relative square error essentially decays linearly in the number of weights -- i.e., level of over-parametrization. Our result holds across a range of input distributions and for both fully-connected and convolutional architectures thereby also extending previous results. To empirically evaluate the method, we quantize several common architectures with few bits per weight, and test them on ImageNet, showing only minor loss of accuracy compared to unquantized models. We also demonstrate that standard modifications, such as bias correction and mixed precision quantization, further improve accuracy.

The emergence of visual autoregressive (AR) models has revolutionized image generation while presenting new challenges for synthetic image detection. Unlike previous GAN or diffusion-based methods, AR models generate images through discrete token prediction, exhibiting both marked improvements in image synthesis quality and unique characteristics in their vector-quantized representations. In this paper, we propose to leverage Discrete Distribution Discrepancy-aware Quantization Error (D^3QE) for autoregressive-generated image detection that exploits the distinctive patterns and the frequency distribution bias of the codebook existing in real and fake images. We introduce a discrete distribution discrepancy-aware transformer that integrates dynamic codebook frequency statistics into its attention mechanism, fusing semantic features and quantization error latent. To evaluate our method, we construct a comprehensive dataset termed ARForensics covering 7 mainstream visual AR models. Experiments demonstrate superior detection accuracy and strong generalization of D^3QE across different AR models, with robustness to real-world perturbations. Code is available at https://github.com/Zhangyr2022/D3QE{https://github.com/Zhangyr2022/D3QE}.

The rapid progress of Large Language Models (LLMs) has brought substantial computational and memory demands, spurring the adoption of low-bit quantization. While 8-bit and 4-bit formats have become prevalent, extending quantization to 2 bits remains challenging due to severe accuracy degradation. To address this, we propose Residual Refinement Quantization (R2Q)-a novel 2-bit quantization framework that decomposes the process into two sequential 1-bit sub-quantizations, forming an adaptive quantization lattice. Extensive evaluations on Llama, OPT, and Qwen across diverse benchmarks-covering question answering, commonsense reasoning, and language modeling-demonstrate that R2Q consistently outperforms existing 2-bit quantization methods in both fine-grained and coarse-grained settings. By refining quantization through a residual learning mechanism, R2Q enhances performance, improves training stability, and accelerates convergence under extreme compression. Furthermore, its modular design enables seamless integration with existing quantization-aware training (QAT) frameworks.

Quantization has become a mainstream compression technique for reducing model size, computational requirements, and energy consumption for modern deep neural networks (DNNs). With the improved numerical support in recent hardware, including multiple variants of integer and floating point, mixed-precision quantization has become necessary to achieve high-quality results with low model cost. Prior mixed-precision quantization methods have performed a post-training quantization search, which compromises on accuracy, or a differentiable quantization search, which leads to high memory usage from branching. Therefore, we propose the first one-shot mixed-precision quantization search that eliminates the need for retraining in both integer and low-precision floating point models. We evaluate our floating-point and integer quantization search (FLIQS) on multiple convolutional networks and vision transformer models to discover Pareto-optimal models. Our approach discovers models that improve upon uniform precision, manual mixed-precision, and recent integer quantization search methods. With the proposed integer quantization search, we increase the accuracy of ResNet-18 on ImageNet by 1.31% points and ResNet-50 by 0.90% points with equivalent model cost over previous methods. Additionally, for the first time, we explore a novel mixed-precision floating-point search and improve MobileNetV2 by up to 0.98% points compared to prior state-of-the-art FP8 models. Finally, we extend FLIQS to simultaneously search a joint quantization and neural architecture space and improve the ImageNet accuracy by 2.69% points with similar model cost on a MobileNetV2 search space.

Recent advances in self-supervised learning and the Transformer architecture have significantly improved natural language processing (NLP), achieving remarkably low perplexity. However, the growing size of NLP models introduces a memory wall problem during the generation phase. To mitigate this issue, recent efforts have focused on quantizing model weights to sub-4-bit precision while preserving full precision for activations, resulting in practical speed-ups during inference on a single GPU. However, these improvements primarily stem from reduced memory movement, which necessitates a resource-intensive dequantization process rather than actual computational reduction. In this paper, we introduce LUT-GEMM, an efficient kernel for quantized matrix multiplication, which not only eliminates the resource-intensive dequantization process but also reduces computational costs compared to previous kernels for weight-only quantization. Furthermore, we proposed group-wise quantization to offer a flexible trade-off between compression ratio and accuracy. The impact of LUT-GEMM is facilitated by implementing high compression ratios through low-bit quantization and efficient LUT-based operations. We show experimentally that when applied to the OPT-175B model with 3-bit quantization, LUT-GEMM substantially accelerates token generation latency, achieving a remarkable 2.1times improvement on a single GPU when compared to OPTQ, which relies on the costly dequantization process.

Egocentric video-language understanding demands both high efficiency and accurate spatial-temporal modeling. Existing approaches face three key challenges: 1) Excessive pre-training cost arising from multi-stage pre-training pipelines, 2) Ineffective spatial-temporal encoding due to manually split 3D rotary positional embeddings that hinder feature interactions, and 3) Imprecise learning objectives in soft-label multi-instance retrieval, which neglect negative pair correlations. In this paper, we introduce EVA02-AT, a suite of EVA02-based video-language foundation models tailored to egocentric video understanding tasks. EVA02-AT first efficiently transfers an image-based CLIP model into a unified video encoder via a single-stage pretraining. Second, instead of applying rotary positional embeddings to isolated dimensions, we introduce spatial-temporal rotary positional embeddings along with joint attention, which can effectively encode both spatial and temporal information on the entire hidden dimension. This joint encoding of spatial-temporal features enables the model to learn cross-axis relationships, which are crucial for accurately modeling motion and interaction in videos. Third, focusing on multi-instance video-language retrieval tasks, we introduce the Symmetric Multi-Similarity (SMS) loss and a novel training framework that advances all soft labels for both positive and negative pairs, providing a more precise learning objective. Extensive experiments on Ego4D, EPIC-Kitchens-100, and Charades-Ego under zero-shot and fine-tuning settings demonstrate that EVA02-AT achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse egocentric video-language tasks with fewer parameters. Models with our SMS loss also show significant performance gains on multi-instance retrieval benchmarks. Our code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/xqwang14/EVA02-AT .

Weight oscillation is an undesirable side effect of quantization-aware training, in which quantized weights frequently jump between two quantized levels, resulting in training instability and a sub-optimal final model. We discover that the learnable scaling factor, a widely-used de facto setting in quantization aggravates weight oscillation. In this study, we investigate the connection between the learnable scaling factor and quantized weight oscillation and use ViT as a case driver to illustrate the findings and remedies. In addition, we also found that the interdependence between quantized weights in query and key of a self-attention layer makes ViT vulnerable to oscillation. We, therefore, propose three techniques accordingly: statistical weight quantization (rm StatsQ) to improve quantization robustness compared to the prevalent learnable-scale-based method; confidence-guided annealing (rm CGA) that freezes the weights with high confidence and calms the oscillating weights; and query-key reparameterization (rm QKR) to resolve the query-key intertwined oscillation and mitigate the resulting gradient misestimation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that these proposed techniques successfully abate weight oscillation and consistently achieve substantial accuracy improvement on ImageNet. Specifically, our 2-bit DeiT-T/DeiT-S algorithms outperform the previous state-of-the-art by 9.8% and 7.7%, respectively. Code and models are available at: https://github.com/nbasyl/OFQ.

Quantization of Deep Neural Network (DNN) activations is a commonly used technique to reduce compute and memory demands during DNN inference, which can be particularly beneficial on resource-constrained devices. To achieve high accuracy, existing methods for quantizing activations rely on complex mathematical computations or perform extensive searches for the best hyper-parameters. However, these expensive operations are impractical on devices with limited computation capabilities, memory capacities, and energy budgets. Furthermore, many existing methods do not focus on sub-6-bit (or deep) quantization. To fill these gaps, in this paper we propose DQA (Deep Quantization of DNN Activations), a new method that focuses on sub-6-bit quantization of activations and leverages simple shifting-based operations and Huffman coding to be efficient and achieve high accuracy. We evaluate DQA with 3, 4, and 5-bit quantization levels and three different DNN models for two different tasks, image classification and image segmentation, on two different datasets. DQA shows significantly better accuracy (up to 29.28%) compared to the direct quantization method and the state-of-the-art NoisyQuant for sub-6-bit quantization.

Non-parametric quantization has received much attention due to its efficiency on parameters and scalability to a large codebook. In this paper, we present a unified formulation of different non-parametric quantization methods through the lens of lattice coding. The geometry of lattice codes explains the necessity of auxiliary loss terms when training auto-encoders with certain existing lookup-free quantization variants such as BSQ. As a step forward, we explore a few possible candidates, including random lattices, generalized Fibonacci lattices, and densest sphere packing lattices. Among all, we find the Leech lattice-based quantization method, which is dubbed as Spherical Leech Quantization (Λ_{24}-SQ), leads to both a simplified training recipe and an improved reconstruction-compression tradeoff thanks to its high symmetry and even distribution on the hypersphere. In image tokenization and compression tasks, this quantization approach achieves better reconstruction quality across all metrics than BSQ, the best prior art, while consuming slightly fewer bits. The improvement also extends to state-of-the-art auto-regressive image generation frameworks.

Neural network training is a memory- and compute-intensive task. Quantization, which enables low-bitwidth formats in training, can significantly mitigate the workload. To reduce quantization error, recent methods have developed new data formats and additional pre-processing operations on quantizers. However, it remains quite challenging to achieve high accuracy and efficiency simultaneously. In this paper, we explore sub-8-bit integer training from its essence of gradient descent optimization. Our integer training framework includes two components: ShiftQuant to realize accurate gradient estimation, and L1 normalization to smoothen the loss landscape. ShiftQuant attains performance that approaches the theoretical upper bound of group quantization. Furthermore, it liberates group quantization from inefficient memory rearrangement. The L1 normalization facilitates the implementation of fully quantized normalization layers with impressive convergence accuracy. Our method frees sub-8-bit integer training from pre-processing and supports general devices. This framework achieves negligible accuracy loss across various neural networks and tasks (0.92% on 4-bit ResNets, 0.61% on 6-bit Transformers). The prototypical implementation of ShiftQuant achieves more than 1.85times/15.3% performance improvement on CPU/GPU compared to its FP16 counterparts, and 33.9% resource consumption reduction on FPGA than the FP16 counterparts. The proposed fully-quantized L1 normalization layers achieve more than 35.54% improvement in throughout on CPU compared to traditional L2 normalization layers. Moreover, theoretical analysis verifies the advancement of our method.

Quantization is a proven effective method for compressing large language models. Although popular techniques like W8A8 and W4A16 effectively maintain model performance, they often fail to concurrently speed up the prefill and decoding stages of inference. W4A8 is a promising strategy to accelerate both of them while usually leads to a significant performance degradation. To address these issues, we present QQQ, a Quality Quattuor-bit Quantization method with 4-bit weights and 8-bit activations. QQQ employs adaptive smoothing and Hessian-based compensation, significantly enhancing the performance of quantized models without extensive training. Furthermore, we meticulously engineer W4A8 GEMM kernels to increase inference speed. Our specialized per-channel W4A8 GEMM and per-group W4A8 GEMM achieve impressive speed increases of 3.67times and 3.29 times over FP16 GEMM. Our extensive experiments show that QQQ achieves performance on par with existing state-of-the-art LLM quantization methods while significantly accelerating inference, achieving speed boosts up to 2.24 times, 2.10times, and 1.25times compared to FP16, W8A8, and W4A16, respectively.

There is a constant need for high-performing and computationally efficient neural network models for image super-resolution: computationally efficient models can be used via low-capacity devices and reduce carbon footprints. One way to obtain such models is to compress models, e.g. quantization. Another way is a neural architecture search that automatically discovers new, more efficient solutions. We propose a novel quantization-aware procedure, the QuantNAS that combines pros of these two approaches. To make QuantNAS work, the procedure looks for quantization-friendly super-resolution models. The approach utilizes entropy regularization, quantization noise, and Adaptive Deviation for Quantization (ADQ) module to enhance the search procedure. The entropy regularization technique prioritizes a single operation within each block of the search space. Adding quantization noise to parameters and activations approximates model degradation after quantization, resulting in a more quantization-friendly architectures. ADQ helps to alleviate problems caused by Batch Norm blocks in super-resolution models. Our experimental results show that the proposed approximations are better for search procedure than direct model quantization. QuantNAS discovers architectures with better PSNR/BitOps trade-off than uniform or mixed precision quantization of fixed architectures. We showcase the effectiveness of our method through its application to two search spaces inspired by the state-of-the-art SR models and RFDN. Thus, anyone can design a proper search space based on an existing architecture and apply our method to obtain better quality and efficiency. The proposed procedure is 30\% faster than direct weight quantization and is more stable.

We tackle the problem of estimating a Manhattan frame, i.e. three orthogonal vanishing points, and the unknown focal length of the camera, leveraging a prior vertical direction. The direction can come from an Inertial Measurement Unit that is a standard component of recent consumer devices, e.g., smartphones. We provide an exhaustive analysis of minimal line configurations and derive two new 2-line solvers, one of which does not suffer from singularities affecting existing solvers. Additionally, we design a new non-minimal method, running on an arbitrary number of lines, to boost the performance in local optimization. Combining all solvers in a hybrid robust estimator, our method achieves increased accuracy even with a rough prior. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the superior accuracy of our method compared to the state of the art, while having comparable runtimes. We further demonstrate the applicability of our solvers for relative rotation estimation. The code is available at https://github.com/cvg/VP-Estimation-with-Prior-Gravity.

LLMs are seeing growing use for applications such as document analysis and summarization which require large context windows, and with these large context windows KV cache activations surface as the dominant contributor to memory consumption during inference. Quantization is a promising approach for compressing KV cache activations; however, existing solutions fail to represent activations accurately in ultra-low precisions, such as sub-4-bit. In this work, we present KVQuant, which addresses this problem by incorporating novel methods for quantizing cached KV activations, including: (i) Per-Channel Key Quantization, where we adjust the dimension along which we quantize the Key activations to better match the distribution; (ii) Pre-RoPE Key Quantization, where we quantize Key activations before the rotary positional embedding to mitigate its impact on quantization; (iii) Non-Uniform KV Cache Quantization, where we derive per-layer sensitivity-weighted non-uniform datatypes that better represent the distributions; (iv) Per-Vector Dense-and-Sparse Quantization, where we isolate outliers separately for each vector to minimize skews in quantization ranges; and (v) Q-Norm, where we normalize quantization centroids in order to mitigate distribution shift, providing additional benefits for 2-bit quantization. By applying our method to the LLaMA, LLaMA-2, and Mistral models, we achieve <0.1 perplexity degradation with 3-bit quantization on both Wikitext-2 and C4, outperforming existing approaches. Our method enables serving the LLaMA-7B model with a context length of up to 1 million on a single A100-80GB GPU and up to 10 million on an 8-GPU system.

Effective image tokenization is crucial for both multi-modal understanding and generation tasks due to the necessity of the alignment with discrete text data. To this end, existing approaches utilize vector quantization (VQ) to project pixels onto a discrete codebook and reconstruct images from the discrete representation. However, compared with the continuous latent space, the limited discrete codebook space significantly restrict the representational ability of these image tokenizers. In this paper, we propose GaussianToken: An Effective Image Tokenizer with 2D Gaussian Splatting as a solution. We first represent the encoded samples as multiple flexible featured 2D Gaussians characterized by positions, rotation angles, scaling factors, and feature coefficients. We adopt the standard quantization for the Gaussian features and then concatenate the quantization results with the other intrinsic Gaussian parameters before the corresponding splatting operation and the subsequent decoding module. In general, GaussianToken integrates the local influence of 2D Gaussian distribution into the discrete space and thus enhances the representation capability of the image tokenizer. Competitive reconstruction performances on CIFAR, Mini-ImageNet, and ImageNet-1K demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework. Our code is available at: https://github.com/ChrisDong-THU/GaussianToken.

Model size and inference speed/power have become a major challenge in the deployment of Neural Networks for many applications. A promising approach to address these problems is quantization. However, uniformly quantizing a model to ultra low precision leads to significant accuracy degradation. A novel solution for this is to use mixed-precision quantization, as some parts of the network may allow lower precision as compared to other layers. However, there is no systematic way to determine the precision of different layers. A brute force approach is not feasible for deep networks, as the search space for mixed-precision is exponential in the number of layers. Another challenge is a similar factorial complexity for determining block-wise fine-tuning order when quantizing the model to a target precision. Here, we introduce Hessian AWare Quantization (HAWQ), a novel second-order quantization method to address these problems. HAWQ allows for the automatic selection of the relative quantization precision of each layer, based on the layer's Hessian spectrum. Moreover, HAWQ provides a deterministic fine-tuning order for quantizing layers, based on second-order information. We show the results of our method on Cifar-10 using ResNet20, and on ImageNet using Inception-V3, ResNet50 and SqueezeNext models. Comparing HAWQ with state-of-the-art shows that we can achieve similar/better accuracy with 8times activation compression ratio on ResNet20, as compared to DNAS~wu2018mixed, and up to 1% higher accuracy with up to 14% smaller models on ResNet50 and Inception-V3, compared to recently proposed methods of RVQuant~park2018value and HAQ~wang2018haq. Furthermore, we show that we can quantize SqueezeNext to just 1MB model size while achieving above 68% top1 accuracy on ImageNet.

Diffusion models have demonstrated exceptional generative capabilities but are computationally intensive, posing significant challenges for deployment in resource-constrained or latency-sensitive environments. Quantization offers an effective means to reduce model size and computational cost, with post-training quantization (PTQ) being particularly appealing due to its compatibility with pre-trained models without requiring retraining or training data. However, existing PTQ methods for diffusion models often rely on architecture-specific heuristics that limit their generalizability and hinder integration with industrial deployment pipelines. To address these limitations, we propose SegQuant, a unified quantization framework that adaptively combines complementary techniques to enhance cross-model versatility. SegQuant consists of a segment-aware, graph-based quantization strategy (SegLinear) that captures structural semantics and spatial heterogeneity, along with a dual-scale quantization scheme (DualScale) that preserves polarity-asymmetric activations, which is crucial for maintaining visual fidelity in generated outputs. SegQuant is broadly applicable beyond Transformer-based diffusion models, achieving strong performance while ensuring seamless compatibility with mainstream deployment tools.

Post-training quantization (PTQ) has driven attention to producing efficient large language models (LLMs) with ultra-low costs. Since hand-craft quantization parameters lead to low performance in low-bit quantization, recent methods optimize the quantization parameters through block-wise reconstruction between the floating-point and quantized models. However, these methods suffer from two challenges: accumulated errors from independent one-by-one block quantization and reconstruction difficulties from extreme weight and activation outliers. To address these two challenges, we propose CBQ, a cross-block reconstruction-based PTQ method for LLMs. To reduce error accumulation, we introduce a cross-block dependency with the aid of a homologous reconstruction scheme to build the long-range dependency between adjacent multi-blocks with overlapping. To reduce reconstruction difficulty, we design a coarse-to-fine pre-processing (CFP) to truncate weight outliers and dynamically scale activation outliers before optimization, and an adaptive rounding scheme, called LoRA-Rounding, with two low-rank learnable matrixes to further rectify weight quantization errors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that: (1) CBQ pushes both activation and weight quantization to low-bit settings W4A4, W4A8, and W2A16. (2) CBQ achieves better performance than the existing state-of-the-art methods on various LLMs and benchmark datasets.

Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) is an effective technique for compressing Large Language Models (LLMs). While many studies focus on quantizing both weights and activations, it is still a challenge to maintain the accuracy of LLM after activating quantization. To investigate the primary cause, we extend the concept of kernel from linear algebra to quantization functions to define a new term, "quantization kernel", which refers to the set of elements in activations that are quantized to zero. Through quantitative analysis of the quantization kernel, we find that these elements are crucial for maintaining the accuracy of quantized LLMs. With the decrease of quantization kernel, the precision of quantized LLMs increases. If the quantization kernel proportion is kept below 19% for OPT models and below 1% for LLaMA models, the precision loss from quantizing activations to INT8 becomes negligible. Motivated by the goal of developing a quantization method with small quantization kernel, we propose CrossQuant: a simple yet effective method for quantizing activations. CrossQuant cross-quantizes elements using row and column-wise absolute maximum vectors, achieving a quantization kernel of approximately 16% for OPT models and less than 0.1% for LLaMA models. Experimental results on LLMs (LLaMA, OPT) ranging from 6.7B to 70B parameters demonstrate that CrossQuant improves or maintains perplexity and accuracy in language modeling, zero-shot, and few-shot tasks.

Post-training quantization (PTQ) reduces the memory footprint of LLMs by quantizing their weights to low-precision. In this work, we introduce QuIP#, a weight-only PTQ method that achieves state-of-the-art results in extreme compression regimes (le 4 bits per weight) using three novel techniques. First, QuIP# improves the incoherence processing from QuIP by using the randomized Hadamard transform, which is faster and has better theoretical properties. Second, QuIP# uses vector quantization techniques to take advantage of the ball-shaped sub-Gaussian distribution that incoherent weights possess: specifically, we introduce a set of hardware-efficient codebooks based on the highly symmetric E_8 lattice, which achieves the optimal 8-dimension unit ball packing. Third, QuIP# uses fine-tuning to improve fidelity to the original model. Our experiments show that QuIP# outperforms existing PTQ methods, enables new behaviors in PTQ scaling, and supports fast inference.

Recovering camera poses from a set of images is a foundational task in 3D computer vision, which powers key applications such as 3D scene/object reconstructions. Classic methods often depend on feature correspondence, such as keypoints, which require the input images to have large overlap and small viewpoint changes. Such requirements present considerable challenges in scenarios with sparse views. Recent data-driven approaches aim to directly output camera poses, either through regressing the 6DoF camera poses or formulating rotation as a probability distribution. However, each approach has its limitations. On one hand, directly regressing the camera poses can be ill-posed, since it assumes a single mode, which is not true under symmetry and leads to sub-optimal solutions. On the other hand, probabilistic approaches are capable of modeling the symmetry ambiguity, yet they sample the entire space of rotation uniformly by brute-force. This leads to an inevitable trade-off between high sample density, which improves model precision, and sample efficiency that determines the runtime. In this paper, we propose ADen to unify the two frameworks by employing a generator and a discriminator: the generator is trained to output multiple hypotheses of 6DoF camera pose to represent a distribution and handle multi-mode ambiguity, and the discriminator is trained to identify the hypothesis that best explains the data. This allows ADen to combine the best of both worlds, achieving substantially higher precision as well as lower runtime than previous methods in empirical evaluations.

Recently, it is shown that deploying a proper self-supervision is a prospective way to enhance the performance of supervised learning. Yet, the benefits of self-supervision are not fully exploited as previous pretext tasks are specialized for unsupervised representation learning. To this end, we begin by presenting three desirable properties for such auxiliary tasks to assist the supervised objective. First, the tasks need to guide the model to learn rich features. Second, the transformations involved in the self-supervision should not significantly alter the training distribution. Third, the tasks are preferred to be light and generic for high applicability to prior arts. Subsequently, to show how existing pretext tasks can fulfill these and be tailored for supervised learning, we propose a simple auxiliary self-supervision task, predicting localizable rotation (LoRot). Our exhaustive experiments validate the merits of LoRot as a pretext task tailored for supervised learning in terms of robustness and generalization capability. Our code is available at https://github.com/wjun0830/Localizable-Rotation.

Diffusion transformers (DiTs) have exhibited remarkable performance in visual generation tasks, such as generating realistic images or videos based on textual instructions. However, larger model sizes and multi-frame processing for video generation lead to increased computational and memory costs, posing challenges for practical deployment on edge devices. Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) is an effective method for reducing memory costs and computational complexity. When quantizing diffusion transformers, we find that applying existing diffusion quantization methods designed for U-Net faces challenges in preserving quality. After analyzing the major challenges for quantizing diffusion transformers, we design an improved quantization scheme: "ViDiT-Q": Video and Image Diffusion Transformer Quantization) to address these issues. Furthermore, we identify highly sensitive layers and timesteps hinder quantization for lower bit-widths. To tackle this, we improve ViDiT-Q with a novel metric-decoupled mixed-precision quantization method (ViDiT-Q-MP). We validate the effectiveness of ViDiT-Q across a variety of text-to-image and video models. While baseline quantization methods fail at W8A8 and produce unreadable content at W4A8, ViDiT-Q achieves lossless W8A8 quantization. ViDiTQ-MP achieves W4A8 with negligible visual quality degradation, resulting in a 2.5x memory optimization and a 1.5x latency speedup.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are ubiquitous in computer vision and natural language processing, but suffer from high inference cost. This problem can be addressed by quantization, which consists in converting floating point operations into a lower bit-width format. With the growing concerns on privacy rights, we focus our efforts on data-free methods. However, such techniques suffer from their lack of adaptability to the target devices, as a hardware typically only support specific bit widths. Thus, to adapt to a variety of devices, a quantization method shall be flexible enough to find good accuracy v.s. speed trade-offs for every bit width and target device. To achieve this, we propose REx, a quantization method that leverages residual error expansion, along with group sparsity and an ensemble approximation for better parallelization. REx is backed off by strong theoretical guarantees and achieves superior performance on every benchmarked application (from vision to NLP tasks), architecture (ConvNets, transformers) and bit-width (from int8 to ternary quantization).

Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) has received significant attention because it requires only a small set of calibration data to quantize a full-precision model, which is more practical in real-world applications in which full access to a large training set is not available. However, it often leads to overfitting on the small calibration dataset. Several methods have been proposed to address this issue, yet they still rely on only the calibration set for the quantization and they do not validate the quantized model due to the lack of a validation set. In this work, we propose a novel meta-learning based approach to enhance the performance of post-training quantization. Specifically, to mitigate the overfitting problem, instead of only training the quantized model using the original calibration set without any validation during the learning process as in previous PTQ works, in our approach, we both train and validate the quantized model using two different sets of images. In particular, we propose a meta-learning based approach to jointly optimize a transformation network and a quantized model through bi-level optimization. The transformation network modifies the original calibration data and the modified data will be used as the training set to learn the quantized model with the objective that the quantized model achieves a good performance on the original calibration data. Extensive experiments on the widely used ImageNet dataset with different neural network architectures demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art PTQ methods.

We consider the learning from noisy labels (NL) problem which emerges in many real-world applications. In addition to the widely-studied synthetic noise in the NL literature, we also consider the pseudo labels in semi-supervised learning (Semi-SL) as a special case of NL. For both types of noise, we argue that the generalization performance of existing methods is highly coupled with the quality of noisy labels. Therefore, we counter the problem from a novel and unified perspective: learning from the auxiliary clean labels. Specifically, we propose the Rotational-Decoupling Consistency Regularization (RDCR) framework that integrates the consistency-based methods with the self-supervised rotation task to learn noise-tolerant representations. The experiments show that RDCR achieves comparable or superior performance than the state-of-the-art methods under small noise, while outperforms the existing methods significantly when there is large noise.

JPEG is arguably the most popular image coding format, achieving high compression ratios via lossy quantization that may create visual artifacts degradation. Numerous attempts to remove these artifacts were conceived over the years, and common to most of these is the use of deterministic post-processing algorithms that optimize some distortion measure (e.g., PSNR, SSIM). In this paper we propose a different paradigm for JPEG artifact correction: Our method is stochastic, and the objective we target is high perceptual quality -- striving to obtain sharp, detailed and visually pleasing reconstructed images, while being consistent with the compressed input. These goals are achieved by training a stochastic conditional generator (conditioned on the compressed input), accompanied by a theoretically well-founded loss term, resulting in a sampler from the posterior distribution. Our solution offers a diverse set of plausible and fast reconstructions for a given input with perfect consistency. We demonstrate our scheme's unique properties and its superiority to a variety of alternative methods on the FFHQ and ImageNet datasets.

Although two-stage Vector Quantized (VQ) generative models allow for synthesizing high-fidelity and high-resolution images, their quantization operator encodes similar patches within an image into the same index, resulting in a repeated artifact for similar adjacent regions using existing decoder architectures. To address this issue, we propose to incorporate the spatially conditional normalization to modulate the quantized vectors so as to insert spatially variant information to the embedded index maps, encouraging the decoder to generate more photorealistic images. Moreover, we use multichannel quantization to increase the recombination capability of the discrete codes without increasing the cost of model and codebook. Additionally, to generate discrete tokens at the second stage, we adopt a Masked Generative Image Transformer (MaskGIT) to learn an underlying prior distribution in the compressed latent space, which is much faster than the conventional autoregressive model. Experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed modulated VQGAN is able to greatly improve the reconstructed image quality as well as provide high-fidelity image generation.

Transformers have emerged as a universal backbone across 3D perception, video generation, and world models for autonomous driving and embodied AI, where understanding camera geometry is essential for grounding visual observations in three-dimensional space. However, existing camera encoding methods often rely on simplified pinhole assumptions, restricting generalization across the diverse intrinsics and lens distortions in real-world cameras. We introduce Relative Ray Encoding, a geometry-consistent representation that unifies complete camera information, including 6-DoF poses, intrinsics, and lens distortions. To evaluate its capability under diverse controllability demands, we adopt camera-controlled text-to-video generation as a testbed task. Within this setting, we further identify pitch and roll as two components effective for Absolute Orientation Encoding, enabling full control over the initial camera orientation. Together, these designs form UCPE (Unified Camera Positional Encoding), which integrates into a pretrained video Diffusion Transformer through a lightweight spatial attention adapter, adding less than 1% trainable parameters while achieving state-of-the-art camera controllability and visual fidelity. To facilitate systematic training and evaluation, we construct a large video dataset covering a wide range of camera motions and lens types. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of UCPE in camera-controllable video generation and highlight its potential as a general camera representation for Transformers across future multi-view, video, and 3D tasks. Code will be available at https://github.com/chengzhag/UCPE.

Quantizing model weights is critical for reducing the communication and inference costs of large models. However, quantizing models -- especially to low precisions like int4 or int2 -- requires a trade-off in model quality; int2, in particular, is known to severely degrade model quality. Consequently, practitioners are often forced to maintain multiple models with different quantization levels or serve a single model that best satisfies the quality-latency trade-off. On the other hand, integer data types, such as int8, inherently possess a nested (Matryoshka) structure where smaller bit-width integers, like int4 or int2, are nested within the most significant bits. This paper proposes Matryoshka Quantization (MatQuant), a novel multi-scale quantization technique that addresses the challenge of needing multiple quantized models. It allows training and maintaining just one model, which can then be served at different precision levels. Furthermore, due to the co-training and co-distillation regularization provided by MatQuant, the int2 precision models extracted by MatQuant can be up to 10% more accurate than standard int2 quantization (using techniques like QAT or OmniQuant). This represents significant progress in model quantization, demonstrated by the fact that, with the same recipe, an int2 FFN-quantized Gemma-2 9B model is more accurate than an int8 FFN-quantized Gemma-2 2B model.

Albeit the scalable performance of vision transformers (ViTs), the dense computational costs (training & inference) undermine their position in industrial applications. Post-training quantization (PTQ), tuning ViTs with a tiny dataset and running in a low-bit format, well addresses the cost issue but unluckily bears more performance drops in lower-bit cases. In this paper, we introduce I&S-ViT, a novel method that regulates the PTQ of ViTs in an inclusive and stable fashion. I&S-ViT first identifies two issues in the PTQ of ViTs: (1) Quantization inefficiency in the prevalent log2 quantizer for post-Softmax activations; (2) Rugged and magnified loss landscape in coarse-grained quantization granularity for post-LayerNorm activations. Then, I&S-ViT addresses these issues by introducing: (1) A novel shift-uniform-log2 quantizer (SULQ) that incorporates a shift mechanism followed by uniform quantization to achieve both an inclusive domain representation and accurate distribution approximation; (2) A three-stage smooth optimization strategy (SOS) that amalgamates the strengths of channel-wise and layer-wise quantization to enable stable learning. Comprehensive evaluations across diverse vision tasks validate I&S-ViT' superiority over existing PTQ of ViTs methods, particularly in low-bit scenarios. For instance, I&S-ViT elevates the performance of 3-bit ViT-B by an impressive 50.68%.

Diffusion models have shown superior performance in real-world video super-resolution (VSR). However, the slow processing speeds and heavy resource consumption of diffusion models hinder their practical application and deployment. Quantization offers a potential solution for compressing the VSR model. Nevertheless, quantizing VSR models is challenging due to their temporal characteristics and high fidelity requirements. To address these issues, we propose QuantVSR, a low-bit quantization model for real-world VSR. We propose a spatio-temporal complexity aware (STCA) mechanism, where we first utilize the calibration dataset to measure both spatial and temporal complexities for each layer. Based on these statistics, we allocate layer-specific ranks to the low-rank full-precision (FP) auxiliary branch. Subsequently, we jointly refine the FP and low-bit branches to achieve simultaneous optimization. In addition, we propose a learnable bias alignment (LBA) module to reduce the biased quantization errors. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our method obtains comparable performance with the FP model and significantly outperforms recent leading low-bit quantization methods. Code is available at: https://github.com/bowenchai/QuantVSR.

Post-training quantization (PTQ) has emerged as a widely adopted technique for compressing and accelerating Large Language Models (LLMs). The major challenge in LLM quantization is that uneven and heavy-tailed data distributions can expand the quantization range, thereby reducing bit precision for most values. Recent methods attempt to eliminate outliers and balance inter-channel differences by employing linear transformations; however, they remain heuristic and are often overlook optimizing the data distribution across the entire quantization space.In this paper, we introduce Quantization Space Utilization Rate (QSUR), a novel metric that effectively assesses the quantizability of transformed data by measuring the space utilization of the data in the quantization space. We complement QSUR with mathematical derivations that examine the effects and limitations of various transformations, guiding our development of Orthogonal and Scaling Transformation-based Quantization (OSTQuant). OSQuant employs a learnable equivalent transformation, consisting of an orthogonal transformation and a scaling transformation, to optimize the distributions of weights and activations across the entire quantization space. Futhermore, we propose the KL-Top loss function, designed to mitigate noise during optimization while retaining richer semantic information within the limited calibration data imposed by PTQ. OSTQuant outperforms existing work on various LLMs and benchmarks. In the W4-only setting, it retains 99.5\% of the floating-point accuracy. In the more challenging W4A4KV4 configuration, OSTQuant reduces the performance gap by 32\% on the LLaMA-3-8B model compared to state-of-the-art methods. https://github.com/BrotherHappy/OSTQuant{https://github.com/BrotherHappy/OSTQuant}.

We present an efficient high-resolution network, Lite-HRNet, for human pose estimation. We start by simply applying the efficient shuffle block in ShuffleNet to HRNet (high-resolution network), yielding stronger performance over popular lightweight networks, such as MobileNet, ShuffleNet, and Small HRNet. We find that the heavily-used pointwise (1x1) convolutions in shuffle blocks become the computational bottleneck. We introduce a lightweight unit, conditional channel weighting, to replace costly pointwise (1x1) convolutions in shuffle blocks. The complexity of channel weighting is linear w.r.t the number of channels and lower than the quadratic time complexity for pointwise convolutions. Our solution learns the weights from all the channels and over multiple resolutions that are readily available in the parallel branches in HRNet. It uses the weights as the bridge to exchange information across channels and resolutions, compensating the role played by the pointwise (1x1) convolution. Lite-HRNet demonstrates superior results on human pose estimation over popular lightweight networks. Moreover, Lite-HRNet can be easily applied to semantic segmentation task in the same lightweight manner. The code and models have been publicly available at https://github.com/HRNet/Lite-HRNet.

The significant resource requirements associated with Large-scale Language Models (LLMs) have generated considerable interest in the development of techniques aimed at compressing and accelerating neural networks. Among these techniques, Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) has emerged as a subject of considerable interest due to its noteworthy compression efficiency and cost-effectiveness in the context of training. Existing PTQ methods for LLMs limit the optimization scope to scaling transformations between pre- and post-quantization weights. In this paper, we advocate for the direct optimization using equivalent Affine transformations in PTQ (AffineQuant). This approach extends the optimization scope and thus significantly minimizing quantization errors. Additionally, by employing the corresponding inverse matrix, we can ensure equivalence between the pre- and post-quantization outputs of PTQ, thereby maintaining its efficiency and generalization capabilities. To ensure the invertibility of the transformation during optimization, we further introduce a gradual mask optimization method. This method initially focuses on optimizing the diagonal elements and gradually extends to the other elements. Such an approach aligns with the Levy-Desplanques theorem, theoretically ensuring invertibility of the transformation. As a result, significant performance improvements are evident across different LLMs on diverse datasets. To illustrate, we attain a C4 perplexity of 15.76 (2.26 lower vs 18.02 in OmniQuant) on the LLaMA2-7B model of W4A4 quantization without overhead. On zero-shot tasks, AffineQuant achieves an average of 58.61 accuracy (1.98 lower vs 56.63 in OmniQuant) when using 4/4-bit quantization for LLaMA-30B, which setting a new state-of-the-art benchmark for PTQ in LLMs.