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Main Authors: Li, Shuaiting, Deng, Juncan, Wang, Chenxuan, Xu, Kedong, Deng, Rongtao, Gu, Hong, Shen, Haibin, Huang, Kejie
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.08668
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author Li, Shuaiting
Deng, Juncan
Wang, Chenxuan
Xu, Kedong
Deng, Rongtao
Gu, Hong
Shen, Haibin
Huang, Kejie
author_facet Li, Shuaiting
Deng, Juncan
Wang, Chenxuan
Xu, Kedong
Deng, Rongtao
Gu, Hong
Shen, Haibin
Huang, Kejie
contents Vector Quantization (VQ) has emerged as a prominent weight compression technique, showcasing substantially lower quantization errors than uniform quantization across diverse models, particularly in extreme compression scenarios. However, its efficacy during fine-tuning is limited by the constraint of the compression format, where weight vectors assigned to the same codeword are restricted to updates in the same direction. Consequently, many quantized weights are compelled to move in directions contrary to their local gradient information. To mitigate this issue, we introduce a novel VQ paradigm, Sign-Splitting VQ (SSVQ), which decouples the sign bit of weights from the codebook. Our approach involves extracting the sign bits of uncompressed weights and performing clustering and compression on all-positive weights. We then introduce latent variables for the sign bit and jointly optimize both the signs and the codebook. Additionally, we implement a progressive freezing strategy for the learnable sign to ensure training stability. Extensive experiments on various modern models and tasks demonstrate that SSVQ achieves a significantly superior compression-accuracy trade-off compared to conventional VQ. Furthermore, we validate our algorithm on a hardware accelerator, showing that SSVQ achieves a 3$\times$ speedup over the 8-bit compressed model by reducing memory access. Our code is available at https://github.com/list0830/SSVQ.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_08668
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SSVQ: Unleashing the Potential of Vector Quantization with Sign-Splitting
Li, Shuaiting
Deng, Juncan
Wang, Chenxuan
Xu, Kedong
Deng, Rongtao
Gu, Hong
Shen, Haibin
Huang, Kejie
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Vector Quantization (VQ) has emerged as a prominent weight compression technique, showcasing substantially lower quantization errors than uniform quantization across diverse models, particularly in extreme compression scenarios. However, its efficacy during fine-tuning is limited by the constraint of the compression format, where weight vectors assigned to the same codeword are restricted to updates in the same direction. Consequently, many quantized weights are compelled to move in directions contrary to their local gradient information. To mitigate this issue, we introduce a novel VQ paradigm, Sign-Splitting VQ (SSVQ), which decouples the sign bit of weights from the codebook. Our approach involves extracting the sign bits of uncompressed weights and performing clustering and compression on all-positive weights. We then introduce latent variables for the sign bit and jointly optimize both the signs and the codebook. Additionally, we implement a progressive freezing strategy for the learnable sign to ensure training stability. Extensive experiments on various modern models and tasks demonstrate that SSVQ achieves a significantly superior compression-accuracy trade-off compared to conventional VQ. Furthermore, we validate our algorithm on a hardware accelerator, showing that SSVQ achieves a 3$\times$ speedup over the 8-bit compressed model by reducing memory access. Our code is available at https://github.com/list0830/SSVQ.
title SSVQ: Unleashing the Potential of Vector Quantization with Sign-Splitting
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.08668