Where and How to Enhance: Discovering Bit-Width Contribution for Mixed Precision Quantization
This addresses a specific bottleneck in neural network quantization for efficient deployment, offering an incremental improvement over gradient-based methods.
The paper tackled the problem of inaccurate bit-width selection in mixed precision quantization by proposing a Shapley-based method to measure direct contributions, achieving state-of-the-art performance on benchmarks.
Mixed precision quantization (MPQ) is an effective quantization approach to achieve accuracy-complexity trade-off of neural network, through assigning different bit-widths to network activations and weights in each layer. The typical way of existing MPQ methods is to optimize quantization policies (i.e., bit-width allocation) in a gradient descent manner, termed as Differentiable (DMPQ). At the end of the search, the bit-width associated to the quantization parameters which has the largest value will be selected to form the final mixed precision quantization policy, with the implicit assumption that the values of quantization parameters reflect the operation contribution to the accuracy improvement. While much has been discussed about the MPQ improvement, the bit-width selection process has received little attention. We study this problem and argue that the magnitude of quantization parameters does not necessarily reflect the actual contribution of the bit-width to the task performance. Then, we propose a Shapley-based MPQ (SMPQ) method, which measures the bit-width operation direct contribution on the MPQ task. To reduce computation cost, a Monte Carlo sampling-based approximation strategy is proposed for Shapley computation. Extensive experiments on mainstream benchmarks demonstrate that our SMPQ consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance than gradient-based competitors.