Searching Transferable Mixed-Precision Quantization Policy through Large Margin Regularization

Mixed-precision quantization (MPQ) suffers from time-consuming policy search process (i.e., the bit-width assignment for each layer) on large-scale datasets (e.g., ISLVRC-2012), which heavily limits its practicability in real-world deployment scenarios. In this paper, we propose to search the effective MPQ policy by using a small proxy dataset for the model trained on a large-scale one. It breaks the routine that requires a consistent dataset at model training and MPQ policy search time, which can improve the MPQ searching efficiency significantly. However, the discrepant data distributions bring difficulties in searching for such a transferable MPQ policy. Motivated by the observation that quantization narrows the class margin and blurs the decision boundary, we search the policy that guarantees a general and dataset-independent property: discriminability of feature representations. Namely, we seek the policy that can robustly keep the intra-class compactness and inter-class separation. Our method offers several advantages, i.e., high proxy data utilization, no extra hyper-parameter tuning for approximating the relationship between full-precision and quantized model and high searching efficiency. We search high-quality MPQ policies with the proxy dataset that has only 4% of the data scale compared to the large-scale target dataset, achieving the same accuracy as searching directly on the latter, and improving the MPQ searching efficiency by up to 300 times.