Large language models (LLMs) achieve remarkable performance in natural language understanding but require substantial computation and memory resources. Post-training quantization (PTQ) is a powerful compression technique extensively investigated in LLMs. However, existing PTQ methods are still not ideal in terms of accuracy and efficiency, especially with below 4 bit-widths. Standard PTQ methods using group-wise quantization suffer difficulties in quantizing LLMs accurately to such low-bit, but advanced methods remaining high-precision weights element-wisely are hard to realize their theoretical hardware efficiency. This paper presents a Salience-Driven Mixed-Precision Quantization scheme for LLMs, namely SliM-LLM. The scheme exploits the salience distribution of weights to determine optimal bit-width and quantizers for accurate LLM quantization, while aligning bit-width partition to groups for compact memory usage and fast integer inference. Specifically, the proposed SliM-LLM mainly relies on two novel techniques: (1) Salience-Determined Bit Allocation utilizes the clustering characteristics of salience distribution to allocate the bit-widths of each group, increasing the accuracy of quantized LLMs and maintaining the inference efficiency; (2) Salience-Weighted Quantizer Calibration optimizes the parameters of the quantizer by considering the element-wise salience within the group, balancing the maintenance of salient information and minimization of errors. Comprehensive experiments show that SliM-LLM significantly improves the accuracy of LLMs at ultra-low bits, e.g., 2-bit LLaMA-7B achieves a 5.5-times memory-saving than original model on NVIDIA A800 GPUs, and 48% decrease of perplexity compared to the state-of-the-art gradient-free PTQ method. Moreover, SliM-LLM+, which is integrated from the extension of SliM-LLM with gradient-based quantizers, further reduces perplexity by 35.1%.
Lane detection (LD) plays a crucial role in enhancing the L2+ capabilities of autonomous driving, capturing widespread attention. The Post-Processing Quantization (PTQ) could facilitate the practical application of LD models, enabling fast speeds and limited memories without labeled data. However, prior PTQ methods do not consider the complex LD outputs that contain physical semantics, such as offsets, locations, etc., and thus cannot be directly applied to LD models. In this paper, we pioneeringly investigate semantic sensitivity to post-processing for lane detection with a novel Lane Distortion Score. Moreover, we identify two main factors impacting the LD performance after quantization, namely intra-head sensitivity and inter-head sensitivity, where a small quantization error in specific semantics can cause significant lane distortion. Thus, we propose a Selective Focus framework deployed with Semantic Guided Focus and Sensitivity Aware Selection modules, to incorporate post-processing information into PTQ reconstruction. Based on the observed intra-head sensitivity, Semantic Guided Focus is introduced to prioritize foreground-related semantics using a practical proxy. For inter-head sensitivity, we present Sensitivity Aware Selection, efficiently recognizing influential prediction heads and refining the optimization objectives at runtime. Extensive experiments have been done on a wide variety of models including keypoint-, anchor-, curve-, and segmentation-based ones. Our method produces quantized models in minutes on a single GPU and can achieve 6.4% F1 Score improvement on the CULane dataset.
Neural network sparsity has attracted many research interests due to its similarity to biological schemes and high energy efficiency. However, existing methods depend on long-time training or fine-tuning, which prevents large-scale applications. Recently, some works focusing on post-training sparsity (PTS) have emerged. They get rid of the high training cost but usually suffer from distinct accuracy degradation due to neglect of the reasonable sparsity rate at each layer. Previous methods for finding sparsity rates mainly focus on the training-aware scenario, which usually fails to converge stably under the PTS setting with limited data and much less training cost. In this paper, we propose a fast and controllable post-training sparsity (FCPTS) framework. By incorporating a differentiable bridge function and a controllable optimization objective, our method allows for rapid and accurate sparsity allocation learning in minutes, with the added assurance of convergence to a predetermined global sparsity rate. Equipped with these techniques, we can surpass the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin, e.g., over 30\% improvement for ResNet-50 on ImageNet under the sparsity rate of 80\%. Our plug-and-play code and supplementary materials are open-sourced at https://github.com/ModelTC/FCPTS.
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) are propelling us toward artificial general intelligence, thanks to their remarkable emergent abilities and reasoning capabilities. However, the substantial computational and memory requirements of LLMs limit their widespread adoption. Quan- tization, a key compression technique, offers a viable solution to mitigate these demands by compressing and accelerating LLMs, albeit with poten- tial risks to model accuracy. Numerous studies have aimed to minimize the accuracy loss associated with quantization. However, the quantization configurations in these studies vary and may not be optimized for hard- ware compatibility. In this paper, we focus on identifying the most effective practices for quantizing LLMs, with the goal of balancing performance with computational efficiency. For a fair analysis, we develop a quantization toolkit LLMC, and design four crucial principles considering the inference efficiency, quantized accuracy, calibration cost, and modularization. By benchmarking on various models and datasets with over 500 experiments, three takeaways corresponding to calibration data, quantization algorithm, and quantization schemes are derived. Finally, a best practice of LLM PTQ pipeline is constructed. All the benchmark results and the toolkit can be found at https://github.com/ModelTC/llmc.
Deep learning-based lane detection (LD) plays a critical role in autonomous driving systems, such as adaptive cruise control. However, it is vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Existing backdoor attack methods on LD exhibit limited effectiveness in dynamic real-world scenarios, primarily because they fail to consider dynamic scene factors, including changes in driving perspectives (e.g., viewpoint transformations) and environmental conditions (e.g., weather or lighting changes). To tackle this issue, this paper introduces BadLANE, a dynamic scene adaptation backdoor attack for LD designed to withstand changes in real-world dynamic scene factors. To address the challenges posed by changing driving perspectives, we propose an amorphous trigger pattern composed of shapeless pixels. This trigger design allows the backdoor to be activated by various forms or shapes of mud spots or pollution on the road or lens, enabling adaptation to changes in vehicle observation viewpoints during driving. To mitigate the effects of environmental changes, we design a meta-learning framework to train meta-generators tailored to different environmental conditions. These generators produce meta-triggers that incorporate diverse environmental information, such as weather or lighting conditions, as the initialization of the trigger patterns for backdoor implantation, thus enabling adaptation to dynamic environments. Extensive experiments on various commonly used LD models in both digital and physical domains validate the effectiveness of our attacks, outperforming other baselines significantly (+25.15\% on average in Attack Success Rate). Our codes will be available upon paper publication.
Segment Anything Model (SAM) has achieved impressive performance in many computer vision tasks. However, as a large-scale model, the immense memory and computation costs hinder its practical deployment. In this paper, we propose a post-training quantization (PTQ) framework for Segment Anything Model, namely PTQ4SAM. First, we investigate the inherent bottleneck of SAM quantization attributed to the bimodal distribution in post-Key-Linear activations. We analyze its characteristics from both per-tensor and per-channel perspectives, and propose a Bimodal Integration strategy, which utilizes a mathematically equivalent sign operation to transform the bimodal distribution into a relatively easy-quantized normal distribution offline. Second, SAM encompasses diverse attention mechanisms (i.e., self-attention and two-way cross-attention), resulting in substantial variations in the post-Softmax distributions. Therefore, we introduce an Adaptive Granularity Quantization for Softmax through searching the optimal power-of-two base, which is hardware-friendly. Extensive experimental results across various vision tasks (instance segmentation, semantic segmentation and object detection), datasets and model variants show the superiority of PTQ4SAM. For example, when quantizing SAM-L to 6-bit, we achieve lossless accuracy for instance segmentation, about 0.5\% drop with theoretical 3.9$\times$ acceleration. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/chengtao-lv/PTQ4SAM}.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) demonstrate excellent performance on graphs, with their core idea about aggregating neighborhood information and learning from labels. However, the prevailing challenges in most graph datasets are twofold of Insufficient High-Quality Labels and Lack of Neighborhoods, resulting in weak GNNs. Existing data augmentation methods designed to address these two issues often tackle only one. They may either require extensive training of generators, rely on overly simplistic strategies, or demand substantial prior knowledge, leading to suboptimal generalization abilities. To simultaneously address both of these two challenges, we propose an elegant method called IntraMix. IntraMix innovatively employs Mixup among low-quality labeled data of the same class, generating high-quality labeled data at minimal cost. Additionally, it establishes neighborhoods for the generated data by connecting them with data from the same class with high confidence, thereby enriching the neighborhoods of graphs. IntraMix efficiently tackles both challenges faced by graphs and challenges the prior notion of the limited effectiveness of Mixup in node classification. IntraMix serves as a universal framework that can be readily applied to all GNNs. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of IntraMix across various GNNs and datasets.
Meta's LLaMA family has become one of the most powerful open-source Large Language Model (LLM) series. Notably, LLaMA3 models have recently been released and achieve impressive performance across various with super-large scale pre-training on over 15T tokens of data. Given the wide application of low-bit quantization for LLMs in resource-limited scenarios, we explore LLaMA3's capabilities when quantized to low bit-width. This exploration holds the potential to unveil new insights and challenges for low-bit quantization of LLaMA3 and other forthcoming LLMs, especially in addressing performance degradation problems that suffer in LLM compression. Specifically, we evaluate the 10 existing post-training quantization and LoRA-finetuning methods of LLaMA3 on 1-8 bits and diverse datasets to comprehensively reveal LLaMA3's low-bit quantization performance. Our experiment results indicate that LLaMA3 still suffers non-negligent degradation in these scenarios, especially in ultra-low bit-width. This highlights the significant performance gap under low bit-width that needs to be bridged in future developments. We expect that this empirical study will prove valuable in advancing future models, pushing the LLMs to lower bit-width with higher accuracy for being practical. Our project is released on https://github.com/Macaronlin/LLaMA3-Quantization and quantized LLaMA3 models are released in https://huggingface.co/LLMQ.
With the advancement of diffusion models (DMs) and the substantially increased computational requirements, quantization emerges as a practical solution to obtain compact and efficient low-bit DMs. However, the highly discrete representation leads to severe accuracy degradation, hindering the quantization of diffusion models to ultra-low bit-widths. In this paper, we propose BinaryDM, a novel accurate quantization-aware training approach to push the weights of diffusion models towards the limit of 1-bit. Firstly, we present a Learnable Multi-basis Binarizer (LMB) to recover the representations generated by the binarized DM, which improves the information in details of representations crucial to the DM. Secondly, a Low-rank Representation Mimicking (LRM) is applied to enhance the binarization-aware optimization of the DM, alleviating the optimization direction ambiguity caused by fine-grained alignment. Moreover, a progressive initialization strategy is applied to training DMs to avoid convergence difficulties. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that BinaryDM achieves significant accuracy and efficiency gains compared to SOTA quantization methods of DMs under ultra-low bit-widths. As the first binarization method for diffusion models, BinaryDM achieves impressive 16.0 times FLOPs and 27.1 times storage savings with 1-bit weight and 4-bit activation, showcasing its substantial advantages and potential for deploying DMs on resource-limited scenarios.
This article describes the 2023 IEEE Low-Power Computer Vision Challenge (LPCVC). Since 2015, LPCVC has been an international competition devoted to tackling the challenge of computer vision (CV) on edge devices. Most CV researchers focus on improving accuracy, at the expense of ever-growing sizes of machine models. LPCVC balances accuracy with resource requirements. Winners must achieve high accuracy with short execution time when their CV solutions run on an embedded device, such as Raspberry PI or Nvidia Jetson Nano. The vision problem for 2023 LPCVC is segmentation of images acquired by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs, also called drones) after disasters. The 2023 LPCVC attracted 60 international teams that submitted 676 solutions during the submission window of one month. This article explains the setup of the competition and highlights the winners' methods that improve accuracy and shorten execution time.