PackQViT: Faster Sub-8-bit Vision Transformers via Full and Packed Quantization on the Mobile

Peiyan Dong, LEI LU, Chao Wu, Cheng Lyu, Geng Yuan, Hao Tang, Yanzhi Wang

Keywords: Vision Transformers, Quantization, Real-time on mobile, Sub-8-bit

Abstract:

While Vision Transformers (ViTs) have undoubtedly made impressive strides in computer vision (CV), their intricate network structures necessitate substantial computation and memory resources.
A decision-making process for CV tasks typically entails performing computations with low latency, which is a tricky problem for ViT models.
Model quantization is a widely-used technique to optimize the hardware efficiency of deep neural networks.
Full quantization under Sub-8-bit precision, in particular, is a promising solution to reduce inference latency significantly.
Unfortunately, current commodity hardware, such as CPUs and GPUs, still struggles to efficiently execute these sub-8-bit quantized networks, as their SIMD instructions only support a granularity of 8 bits or wider.
Also, there is a scarcity of literature that presents a full quantization paradigm for ViTs.
In this paper, we propose an activation-aware fully sub-8-bit quantization-aware training (QAT) framework called PackQViT for efficient yet accurate ViT acceleration on mobile devices to facilitate real-time AI-powered decision-making.
Specifically, in revisiting data activation within the ViT dataflow, two characteristics are relevant to quantization strategy and precision: the long-tailed distribution and systematic channel-wise outliers.
In response, we employ either log2 quantization or clipping to address the long-tailed distribution and incorporate outlier-aware training for residual link quantization to regulate the various channel-wise outliers more consistently.
Notably, due to the systematic fixed pattern, outlier-aware training approach can predict the channel indices and regularized scales of outliers in advance, thus avoiding the runtime data-adaptive selection during inference.
Furthermore, we employ Int-$2^{n}$-Softmax, Int-LayerNorm, and Integer GELU to enable integer-only computation flow. Finally, we develop a SIMD-based 4-bit packed multiplier to achieve end-to-end ViT acceleration on mobile phones.
Compared to prior studies on ViT quantization using 8-bit precision, PackQViT surpasses other works by an improved accuracy ranging from 0.4\% to 17.9\% for various widely used ViTs on ImageNet dataset; under 4-bit precision, PackQViT demonstrates 0.4%$\sim$2.8% higher accuracy. Compared to the baseline multiplier, our implementations on the Realme GT Android smartphone with Snapdragon 870 SoC CPU achieve 2.6x$\sim$3.7x speedup under 8-bit scenario and 3.8x$\sim$5.9x speedup under 4-bit which ensures practical real-time performance.

Submission Number: 3609