Vui Seng Chua

Vui Seng Chua, Yujie Pan, Nilesh Jain

We present Statistical Calibrated Activation Pruning (SCAP), a post-training activation pruning framework that (1) generalizes sparsification by input activations of Fully-Connected layers for generic and flexible application across Transformers, and (2) features a simple Mode-Centering technique to pre-calibrate activation distributions for maximizing post-training sparsity. Our results demonstrate robust Pareto efficiency compared to prior methods, translating to a 1.5x additional LLM decoding speedup against CATS at iso model quality. SCAP effectiveness is empirically verified across a wide range of models, including recent Transformer Decoders, MoE, Mamba2, Encoding Transformer, and pre-quantized models, highlighting its practicality and scalability. The code is available at: https://github.com/IntelLabs/SCAP.

Ahmed F. AbouElhamayed, Jordan Dotzel, Yash Akhauri et al.

Large language models have high compute, latency, and memory requirements. While specialized accelerators such as GPUs and TPUs typically run these workloads, CPUs are more widely available and consume less energy. Accelerating LLMs with CPUs enables broader AI access at a lower cost and power consumption. This acceleration potential for CPUs is especially relevant during the memory-bound decoding stage of LLM inference, which processes one token at a time and is becoming increasingly utilized with reasoning models. We utilize Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) support on the latest Intel CPUs together with unstructured sparsity to achieve a $1.42 \times$ reduction in end-to-end latency compared to the current PyTorch implementation by applying our technique in linear layers. We provide a set of open-source customized sparse kernels that can speed up any PyTorch model by automatically replacing all linear layers with our custom sparse implementation. Furthermore, we demonstrate for the first time the use of unstructured sparsity in the attention computation achieving a $1.14 \times$ speedup over the current systems without compromising accuracy. Code: https://github.com/IntelLabs/Hardware-Aware-Automated-Machine-Learning/tree/main/SparAMX

Santiago Miret, Vui Seng Chua, Mattias Marder et al.

Mixed-precision quantization is a powerful tool to enable memory and compute savings of neural network workloads by deploying different sets of bit-width precisions on separate compute operations. In this work, we present a flexible and scalable framework for automated mixed-precision quantization that concurrently optimizes task performance, memory compression, and compute savings through multi-objective evolutionary computing. Our framework centers on Neuroevolution-Enhanced Multi-Objective Optimization (NEMO), a novel search method, which combines established search methods with the representational power of neural networks. Within NEMO, the population is divided into structurally distinct sub-populations, or species, which jointly create the Pareto frontier of solutions for the multi-objective problem. At each generation, species perform separate mutation and crossover operations, and are re-sized in proportion to the goodness of their contribution to the Pareto frontier. In our experiments, we define a graph-based representation to describe the underlying workload, enabling us to deploy graph neural networks trained by NEMO via neuroevolution, to find Pareto optimal configurations for MobileNet-V2, ResNet50 and ResNeXt-101-32x8d. Compared to the state-of-the-art, we achieve competitive results on memory compression and superior results for compute compression. Further analysis reveals that the graph representation and the species-based approach employed by NEMO are critical to finding optimal solutions.