Agile-Quant: Activation-Guided Quantization for Faster Inference of LLMs on the Edge

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Main Authors: Shen, Xuan, Dong, Peiyan, Lu, Lei, Kong, Zhenglun, Li, Zhengang, Lin, Ming, Wu, Chao, Wang, Yanzhi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Shen, Xuan
Dong, Peiyan
Lu, Lei
Kong, Zhenglun
Li, Zhengang
Lin, Ming
Wu, Chao
Wang, Yanzhi
author_facet Shen, Xuan
Dong, Peiyan
Lu, Lei
Kong, Zhenglun
Li, Zhengang
Lin, Ming
Wu, Chao
Wang, Yanzhi
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) stand out for their impressive performance in intricate language modeling tasks. However, their demanding computational and memory needs pose obstacles for broad use on edge devices. Quantization is then introduced to boost LLMs' on-device efficiency. Recent works show that 8-bit or lower weight quantization is feasible with minimal impact on end-to-end task performance, while the activation is still not quantized. On the other hand, mainstream commodity edge devices still struggle to execute these sub-8-bit quantized networks effectively. In this paper, we propose Agile-Quant, an activation-guided quantization framework for popular Large Language Models (LLMs), and implement an end-to-end accelerator on multiple edge devices for faster inference. Considering the hardware profiling and activation analysis, we first introduce a basic activation quantization strategy to balance the trade-off of task performance and real inference speed. Then we leverage the activation-aware token pruning technique to reduce the outliers and the adverse impact on attentivity. Ultimately, we utilize the SIMD-based 4-bit multiplier and our efficient TRIP matrix multiplication to implement the accelerator for LLMs on the edge. We apply our framework on different scales of LLMs including LLaMA, OPT, and BLOOM with 4-bit or 8-bit for the activation and 4-bit for the weight quantization. Experiments show that Agile-Quant achieves simultaneous quantization of model weights and activations while maintaining task performance comparable to existing weight-only quantization methods. Moreover, in the 8- and 4-bit scenario, Agile-Quant achieves an on-device speedup of up to 2.55x compared to its FP16 counterparts across multiple edge devices, marking a pioneering advancement in this domain. Code: https://github.com/shawnricecake/agile-quant
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2312_05693
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Agile-Quant: Activation-Guided Quantization for Faster Inference of LLMs on the Edge
Shen, Xuan
Dong, Peiyan
Lu, Lei
Kong, Zhenglun
Li, Zhengang
Lin, Ming
Wu, Chao
Wang, Yanzhi
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Large Language Models (LLMs) stand out for their impressive performance in intricate language modeling tasks. However, their demanding computational and memory needs pose obstacles for broad use on edge devices. Quantization is then introduced to boost LLMs' on-device efficiency. Recent works show that 8-bit or lower weight quantization is feasible with minimal impact on end-to-end task performance, while the activation is still not quantized. On the other hand, mainstream commodity edge devices still struggle to execute these sub-8-bit quantized networks effectively. In this paper, we propose Agile-Quant, an activation-guided quantization framework for popular Large Language Models (LLMs), and implement an end-to-end accelerator on multiple edge devices for faster inference. Considering the hardware profiling and activation analysis, we first introduce a basic activation quantization strategy to balance the trade-off of task performance and real inference speed. Then we leverage the activation-aware token pruning technique to reduce the outliers and the adverse impact on attentivity. Ultimately, we utilize the SIMD-based 4-bit multiplier and our efficient TRIP matrix multiplication to implement the accelerator for LLMs on the edge. We apply our framework on different scales of LLMs including LLaMA, OPT, and BLOOM with 4-bit or 8-bit for the activation and 4-bit for the weight quantization. Experiments show that Agile-Quant achieves simultaneous quantization of model weights and activations while maintaining task performance comparable to existing weight-only quantization methods. Moreover, in the 8- and 4-bit scenario, Agile-Quant achieves an on-device speedup of up to 2.55x compared to its FP16 counterparts across multiple edge devices, marking a pioneering advancement in this domain. Code: https://github.com/shawnricecake/agile-quant
title Agile-Quant: Activation-Guided Quantization for Faster Inference of LLMs on the Edge
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.05693