Yiduo Li

Chuyi Li, Lulu Li, Hongliang Jiang et al.

For years, the YOLO series has been the de facto industry-level standard for efficient object detection. The YOLO community has prospered overwhelmingly to enrich its use in a multitude of hardware platforms and abundant scenarios. In this technical report, we strive to push its limits to the next level, stepping forward with an unwavering mindset for industry application. Considering the diverse requirements for speed and accuracy in the real environment, we extensively examine the up-to-date object detection advancements either from industry or academia. Specifically, we heavily assimilate ideas from recent network design, training strategies, testing techniques, quantization, and optimization methods. On top of this, we integrate our thoughts and practice to build a suite of deployment-ready networks at various scales to accommodate diversified use cases. With the generous permission of YOLO authors, we name it YOLOv6. We also express our warm welcome to users and contributors for further enhancement. For a glimpse of performance, our YOLOv6-N hits 35.9% AP on the COCO dataset at a throughput of 1234 FPS on an NVIDIA Tesla T4 GPU. YOLOv6-S strikes 43.5% AP at 495 FPS, outperforming other mainstream detectors at the same scale~(YOLOv5-S, YOLOX-S, and PPYOLOE-S). Our quantized version of YOLOv6-S even brings a new state-of-the-art 43.3% AP at 869 FPS. Furthermore, YOLOv6-M/L also achieves better accuracy performance (i.e., 49.5%/52.3%) than other detectors with a similar inference speed. We carefully conducted experiments to validate the effectiveness of each component. Our code is made available at https://github.com/meituan/YOLOv6.

Qingyuan Li, Ran Meng, Yiduo Li et al.

The large language model era urges faster and less costly inference. Prior model compression works on LLMs tend to undertake a software-centric approach primarily focused on the simulated quantization performance. By neglecting the feasibility of deployment, these approaches are typically disabled in real practice. They used to drastically push down the quantization bit range for a reduced computation which might not be supported by the mainstream hardware, or involve sophisticated algorithms that introduce extra computation or memory access overhead. We argue that pursuing a hardware-centric approach in the construction of quantization algorithms is crucial. In this regard, we are driven to build our compression method on top of hardware awareness, eliminating impractical algorithm choices while maximizing the benefit of hardware acceleration. Our method, OdysseyLLM, comes with a novel W4A8 kernel implementation called FastGEMM and a combined recipe of quantization strategies. Extensive experiments manifest the superiority of our W4A8 method which brings the actual speed boosting up to \textbf{4$\times$} compared to Hugging Face FP16 inference and \textbf{2.23$\times$} vs. the state-of-the-art inference engine TensorRT-LLM in FP16, and \textbf{1.45$\times$} vs. TensorRT-LLM in INT8, yet without substantially harming the performance.

Qingyuan Li, Ran Meng, Yiduo Li et al.

We introduce Integer Scale, a novel post-training quantization scheme for large language models that effectively resolves the inference bottleneck in current fine-grained quantization approaches while maintaining similar accuracies. Integer Scale is a free lunch as it requires no extra calibration or fine-tuning which will otherwise incur additional costs. It can be used plug-and-play for most fine-grained quantization methods. Its integration results in at most 1.85x end-to-end speed boost over the original counterpart with comparable accuracy. Additionally, due to the orchestration of the proposed Integer Scale and fine-grained quantization, we resolved the quantization difficulty for Mixtral-8x7B and LLaMA-3 models with negligible performance degradation, and it comes with an end-to-end speed boost of 2.13x, and 2.31x compared with their FP16 versions respectively.