Stabilizing Quantization-Aware Training by Implicit-Regularization on Hessian Matrix

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Hauptverfasser: Pang, Junbiao, Cai, Tianyang
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Pang, Junbiao
Cai, Tianyang
author_facet Pang, Junbiao
Cai, Tianyang
contents Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) is one of the prevailing neural network compression solutions. However, its stability has been challenged for yielding deteriorating performances as the quantization error is inevitable. We find that the sharp landscape of loss, which leads to a dramatic performance drop, is an essential factor that causes instability. Theoretically, we have discovered that the perturbations in the feature would bring a flat local minima. However, simply adding perturbations into either weight or feature empirically deteriorates the performance of the Full Precision (FP) model. In this paper, we propose Feature-Perturbed Quantization (FPQ) to stochastically perturb the feature and employ the feature distillation method to the quantized model. Our method generalizes well to different network architectures and various QAT methods. Furthermore, we mathematically show that FPQ implicitly regularizes the Hessian norm, which calibrates the smoothness of a loss landscape. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms the current State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) QAT methods and even the FP counterparts.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_11159
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Stabilizing Quantization-Aware Training by Implicit-Regularization on Hessian Matrix
Pang, Junbiao
Cai, Tianyang
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) is one of the prevailing neural network compression solutions. However, its stability has been challenged for yielding deteriorating performances as the quantization error is inevitable. We find that the sharp landscape of loss, which leads to a dramatic performance drop, is an essential factor that causes instability. Theoretically, we have discovered that the perturbations in the feature would bring a flat local minima. However, simply adding perturbations into either weight or feature empirically deteriorates the performance of the Full Precision (FP) model. In this paper, we propose Feature-Perturbed Quantization (FPQ) to stochastically perturb the feature and employ the feature distillation method to the quantized model. Our method generalizes well to different network architectures and various QAT methods. Furthermore, we mathematically show that FPQ implicitly regularizes the Hessian norm, which calibrates the smoothness of a loss landscape. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms the current State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) QAT methods and even the FP counterparts.
title Stabilizing Quantization-Aware Training by Implicit-Regularization on Hessian Matrix
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.11159