Quamba: A Post-Training Quantization Recipe for Selective State Space Models

State Space Models (SSMs) have emerged as an appealing alternative to Transformers for large language models, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy with constant memory complexity which allows for holding longer context lengths than attention-based networks. The superior computational efficiency of SSMs in long sequence modeling positions them favorably over Transformers in many scenarios. However, improving the efficiency of SSMs on request-intensive cloud-serving and resource-limited edge applications is still a formidable task. SSM quantization is a possible solution to this problem, making SSMs more suitable for wide deployment, while still maintaining their accuracy. Quantization is a common technique to reduce the model size and to utilize the low bit-width acceleration features on modern computing units, yet existing quantization techniques are poorly suited for SSMs. Most notably, SSMs have highly sensitive feature maps within the selective scan mechanism (i.e., linear recurrence) and massive outliers in the output activations which are not present in the output of token-mixing in the self-attention modules. To address this issue, we propose a static 8-bit per-tensor SSM quantization method which suppresses the maximum values of the input activations to the selective SSM for finer quantization precision and quantizes the output activations in an outlier-free space with Hadamard transform. Our 8-bit weight-activation quantized Mamba 2.8B SSM benefits from hardware acceleration and achieves a 1.72x lower generation latency on an Nvidia Orin Nano 8G, with only a 0.9% drop in average accuracy on zero-shot tasks. The experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and practical applicability of our approach for deploying SSM-based models of all sizes on both cloud and edge platforms.

ELSA: Exploiting Layer-wise N:M Sparsity for Vision Transformer Acceleration

$N{:}M$ sparsity is an emerging model compression method supported by more and more accelerators to speed up sparse matrix multiplication in deep neural networks. Most existing $N{:}M$ sparsity methods compress neural networks with a uniform setting for all layers in a network or heuristically determine the layer-wise configuration by considering the number of parameters in each layer. However, very few methods have been designed for obtaining a layer-wise customized $N{:}M$ sparse configuration for vision transformers (ViTs), which usually consist of transformer blocks involving the same number of parameters. In this work, to address the challenge of selecting suitable sparse configuration for ViTs on $N{:}M$ sparsity-supporting accelerators, we propose ELSA, Exploiting Layer-wise $N{:}M$ Sparsity for ViTs. Considering not only all $N{:}M$ sparsity levels supported by a given accelerator but also the expected throughput improvement, our methodology can reap the benefits of accelerators supporting mixed sparsity by trading off negligible accuracy loss with both memory usage and inference time reduction for ViT models. For instance, our approach achieves a noteworthy 2.9$\times$ reduction in FLOPs for both Swin-B and DeiT-B with only a marginal degradation of accuracy on ImageNet. Our code will be released upon paper acceptance.

Palu: Compressing KV-Cache with Low-Rank Projection

KV-Cache compression methods generally sample a KV-Cache of effectual tokens or quantize it into lower bits. However, these methods cannot exploit the redundancy of the hidden dimension of KV tensors. This paper investigates a unique hidden dimension approach called Palu, a novel KV-Cache compression framework that utilizes low-rank projection. Palu decomposes the linear layers into low-rank matrices, caches the smaller intermediate states, and reconstructs the full keys and values on the fly. To improve accuracy, compression rate, and efficiency, Palu further encompasses (1) a medium-grained low-rank decomposition scheme, (2) an efficient rank search algorithm, (3) a low-rank-aware quantization algorithm, and (4) matrix fusion with optimized GPU kernels. Our extensive experiments with popular LLMs show that Palu can compress KV-Cache by more than 91.25% while maintaining a significantly better accuracy (up to 1.19 lower perplexity) than state-of-the-art KV-Cache quantization methods at a similar or even higher memory usage. When compressing KV-Cache for 50%, Palu delivers up to 1.61x end-to-end speedup for the attention module. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/shadowpa0327/Palu.

FLORA: Fine-grained Low-Rank Architecture Search for Vision Transformer

Vision Transformers (ViT) have recently demonstrated success across a myriad of computer vision tasks. However, their elevated computational demands pose significant challenges for real-world deployment. While low-rank approximation stands out as a renowned method to reduce computational loads, efficiently automating the target rank selection in ViT remains a challenge. Drawing from the notable similarity and alignment between the processes of rank selection and One-Shot NAS, we introduce FLORA, an end-to-end automatic framework based on NAS. To overcome the design challenge of supernet posed by vast search space, FLORA employs a low-rank aware candidate filtering strategy. This method adeptly identifies and eliminates underperforming candidates, effectively alleviating potential undertraining and interference among subnetworks. To further enhance the quality of low-rank supernets, we design a low-rank specific training paradigm. First, we propose weight inheritance to construct supernet and enable gradient sharing among low-rank modules. Secondly, we adopt low-rank aware sampling to strategically allocate training resources, taking into account inherited information from pre-trained models. Empirical results underscore FLORA's efficacy. With our method, a more fine-grained rank configuration can be generated automatically and yield up to 33% extra FLOPs reduction compared to a simple uniform configuration. More specific, FLORA-DeiT-B/FLORA-Swin-B can save up to 55%/42% FLOPs almost without performance degradtion. Importantly, FLORA boasts both versatility and orthogonality, offering an extra 21%-26% FLOPs reduction when integrated with leading compression techniques or compact hybrid structures. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/shadowpa0327/FLORA.

Q-YOLOP: Quantization-aware You Only Look Once for Panoptic Driving Perception

In this work, we present an efficient and quantization-aware panoptic driving perception model (Q- YOLOP) for object detection, drivable area segmentation, and lane line segmentation, in the context of autonomous driving. Our model employs the Efficient Layer Aggregation Network (ELAN) as its backbone and task-specific heads for each task. We employ a four-stage training process that includes pretraining on the BDD100K dataset, finetuning on both the BDD100K and iVS datasets, and quantization-aware training (QAT) on BDD100K. During the training process, we use powerful data augmentation techniques, such as random perspective and mosaic, and train the model on a combination of the BDD100K and iVS datasets. Both strategies enhance the model's generalization capabilities. The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance with an mAP@0.5 of 0.622 for object detection and an mIoU of 0.612 for segmentation, while maintaining low computational and memory requirements.

FOX-NAS: Fast, On-device and Explainable Neural Architecture Search

Neural architecture search can discover neural networks with good performance, and One-Shot approaches are prevalent. One-Shot approaches typically require a supernet with weight sharing and predictors that predict the performance of architecture. However, the previous methods take much time to generate performance predictors thus are inefficient. To this end, we propose FOX-NAS that consists of fast and explainable predictors based on simulated annealing and multivariate regression. Our method is quantization-friendly and can be efficiently deployed to the edge. The experiments on different hardware show that FOX-NAS models outperform some other popular neural network architectures. For example, FOX-NAS matches MobileNetV2 and EfficientNet-Lite0 accuracy with 240% and 40% less latency on the edge CPU. FOX-NAS is the 3rd place winner of the 2020 Low-Power Computer Vision Challenge (LPCVC), DSP classification track. See all evaluation results at https://lpcv.ai/competitions/2020. Search code and pre-trained models are released at https://github.com/great8nctu/FOX-NAS.