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Main Authors: Yu, JiangYong, Zhou, Sifan, Yang, Dawei, Wang, Shuo, Li, Shuoyu, Hu, Xing, Xu, Chen, Xu, Zukang, Shu, Changyong, Yuan, Zhihang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.00425
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author Yu, JiangYong
Zhou, Sifan
Yang, Dawei
Wang, Shuo
Li, Shuoyu
Hu, Xing
Xu, Chen
Xu, Zukang
Shu, Changyong
Yuan, Zhihang
author_facet Yu, JiangYong
Zhou, Sifan
Yang, Dawei
Wang, Shuo
Li, Shuoyu
Hu, Xing
Xu, Chen
Xu, Zukang
Shu, Changyong
Yuan, Zhihang
contents Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have garnered widespread attention due to their ability to understand multimodal input. However, their large parameter sizes and substantial computational demands severely hinder their practical deployment and application.While quantization is an effective way to reduce model size and inference latency, its application to MLLMs remains underexplored. In this paper, we propose MQuant, a post-training quantization (PTQ) framework designed to tackle the unique challenges of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Conventional quantization often struggles with MLLMs because of (a) high inference latency from large visual token counts, (b) distributional disparities between visual and textual tokens, and (c) extreme outliers introduced by Hadamard-based transformations. To address these issues, MQuant introduces: Modality-Specific Static Quantization (MSQ), assigning distinct static scales for visual vs. textual tokens; Attention-Invariant Flexible Switching (AIFS), reordering tokens to preserve casual attention while eliminating expensive token-wise scale computations; Rotation Magnitude Suppression (RMS), mitigating weight outliers arising from online Hadamard rotations. On five mainstream MLLMs (including Qwen-VL, MiniCPM-V, CogVLM2), MQuant under W4A8 achieves near-floating-point accuracy (<1% degradation) while reducing inference latency by up to 30%, significantly outperforming existing PTQ baselines. Our MQuant effectively bridges the gap for efficient and accurate MLLMs inference in resource-constrained devices. Code has been released in https://github.com/StiphyJay/MQuant.
format Preprint
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publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MQuant: Unleashing the Inference Potential of Multimodal Large Language Models via Full Static Quantization
Yu, JiangYong
Zhou, Sifan
Yang, Dawei
Wang, Shuo
Li, Shuoyu
Hu, Xing
Xu, Chen
Xu, Zukang
Shu, Changyong
Yuan, Zhihang
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have garnered widespread attention due to their ability to understand multimodal input. However, their large parameter sizes and substantial computational demands severely hinder their practical deployment and application.While quantization is an effective way to reduce model size and inference latency, its application to MLLMs remains underexplored. In this paper, we propose MQuant, a post-training quantization (PTQ) framework designed to tackle the unique challenges of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Conventional quantization often struggles with MLLMs because of (a) high inference latency from large visual token counts, (b) distributional disparities between visual and textual tokens, and (c) extreme outliers introduced by Hadamard-based transformations. To address these issues, MQuant introduces: Modality-Specific Static Quantization (MSQ), assigning distinct static scales for visual vs. textual tokens; Attention-Invariant Flexible Switching (AIFS), reordering tokens to preserve casual attention while eliminating expensive token-wise scale computations; Rotation Magnitude Suppression (RMS), mitigating weight outliers arising from online Hadamard rotations. On five mainstream MLLMs (including Qwen-VL, MiniCPM-V, CogVLM2), MQuant under W4A8 achieves near-floating-point accuracy (<1% degradation) while reducing inference latency by up to 30%, significantly outperforming existing PTQ baselines. Our MQuant effectively bridges the gap for efficient and accurate MLLMs inference in resource-constrained devices. Code has been released in https://github.com/StiphyJay/MQuant.
title MQuant: Unleashing the Inference Potential of Multimodal Large Language Models via Full Static Quantization
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.00425