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Main Authors: Kim, Jaemin, Um, Hongjun, Kim, Sungkyun, Park, Yongjun, Seo, Jiwon
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02822
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author Kim, Jaemin
Um, Hongjun
Kim, Sungkyun
Park, Yongjun
Seo, Jiwon
author_facet Kim, Jaemin
Um, Hongjun
Kim, Sungkyun
Park, Yongjun
Seo, Jiwon
contents Neural networks commonly execute on hardware accelerators such as NPUs and GPUs for their size and computation overhead. These accelerators are costly and it is hard to scale their resources to handle real-time workload fluctuations. We present FlexiQ, an adaptive mixed-precision quantization scheme for computer vision models. FlexiQ selectively applies low-bitwidth computation to feature channels with small value ranges and employs an efficient bit-lowering method to minimize quantization errors while maintaining inference accuracy. Furthermore, FlexiQ adjusts its low-bitwidth channel ratio in real time, enabling quantized models to effectively manage fluctuating inference workload. We implemented FlexiQ prototype, including the mixed-precision inference runtime on our custom NPU and GPUs. Evaluated on eleven convolution- and transformer-based vision models, FlexiQ achieves on average 6.6% higher accuracy for 4-bit models with finetuning and outperforms four state-of-the-art quantization techniques. Moreover, our mixed-precision models achieved an efficient accuracy-latency trade-off, with the 50% 4-bit model incurring only 0.6% accuracy loss while achieving 40% of the speedup of the 100% 4-bit model over 8-bit model. Latency evaluations on our NPU and GPUs confirmed that FlexiQ introduces minimal runtime overhead, demonstrating its hardware efficiency and overall performance benefits.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_02822
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FlexiQ: Adaptive Mixed-Precision Quantization for Latency/Accuracy Trade-Offs in Deep Neural Networks
Kim, Jaemin
Um, Hongjun
Kim, Sungkyun
Park, Yongjun
Seo, Jiwon
Machine Learning
Neural networks commonly execute on hardware accelerators such as NPUs and GPUs for their size and computation overhead. These accelerators are costly and it is hard to scale their resources to handle real-time workload fluctuations. We present FlexiQ, an adaptive mixed-precision quantization scheme for computer vision models. FlexiQ selectively applies low-bitwidth computation to feature channels with small value ranges and employs an efficient bit-lowering method to minimize quantization errors while maintaining inference accuracy. Furthermore, FlexiQ adjusts its low-bitwidth channel ratio in real time, enabling quantized models to effectively manage fluctuating inference workload. We implemented FlexiQ prototype, including the mixed-precision inference runtime on our custom NPU and GPUs. Evaluated on eleven convolution- and transformer-based vision models, FlexiQ achieves on average 6.6% higher accuracy for 4-bit models with finetuning and outperforms four state-of-the-art quantization techniques. Moreover, our mixed-precision models achieved an efficient accuracy-latency trade-off, with the 50% 4-bit model incurring only 0.6% accuracy loss while achieving 40% of the speedup of the 100% 4-bit model over 8-bit model. Latency evaluations on our NPU and GPUs confirmed that FlexiQ introduces minimal runtime overhead, demonstrating its hardware efficiency and overall performance benefits.
title FlexiQ: Adaptive Mixed-Precision Quantization for Latency/Accuracy Trade-Offs in Deep Neural Networks
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02822