Quant-Trim in Practice: Improved Cross-Platform Low-Bit Deployment on Edge NPUs
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arXiv
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| Autori principali: | , |
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| Natura: | Preprint |
| Pubblicazione: |
2025
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| _version_ | 1866915627206180864 |
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| author | Dhahri, Rayen Urban, Steffen |
| author_facet | Dhahri, Rayen Urban, Steffen |
| contents | Specialized edge accelerators rely on low-bit quantization, but vendor compilers differ in scaling, clipping, and kernel support, often as black boxes. The same floating-point (FP) checkpoint can therefore yield inconsistent accuracy across backends, forcing practitioners to tweak flags or refactor models to vendor-friendly operator subsets. We introduce Quant-Trim, a training-phase method that produces a hardware-neutral checkpoint robust to backend and precision choices. It combines progressive fake quantization to align training with the deployed integer grid and reverse pruning to tame outlier-driven scale inflation while preserving learnability. Quant-Trim is agnostic to quantization schemes (symmetric/asymmetric, per-tensor/per-channel, INT8/INT4) and requires no vendor-specific graph changes. Across models and tasks, it narrows the FP-to-low-bit gap, reduces dependence on compiler heuristics/calibration, and avoids per-backend retraining. We report accuracy and edge metrics latency, throughput, energy per inference, and cost under static/dynamic activation scaling and varying operator coverage. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_15300 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Quant-Trim in Practice: Improved Cross-Platform Low-Bit Deployment on Edge NPUs Dhahri, Rayen Urban, Steffen Machine Learning Specialized edge accelerators rely on low-bit quantization, but vendor compilers differ in scaling, clipping, and kernel support, often as black boxes. The same floating-point (FP) checkpoint can therefore yield inconsistent accuracy across backends, forcing practitioners to tweak flags or refactor models to vendor-friendly operator subsets. We introduce Quant-Trim, a training-phase method that produces a hardware-neutral checkpoint robust to backend and precision choices. It combines progressive fake quantization to align training with the deployed integer grid and reverse pruning to tame outlier-driven scale inflation while preserving learnability. Quant-Trim is agnostic to quantization schemes (symmetric/asymmetric, per-tensor/per-channel, INT8/INT4) and requires no vendor-specific graph changes. Across models and tasks, it narrows the FP-to-low-bit gap, reduces dependence on compiler heuristics/calibration, and avoids per-backend retraining. We report accuracy and edge metrics latency, throughput, energy per inference, and cost under static/dynamic activation scaling and varying operator coverage. |
| title | Quant-Trim in Practice: Improved Cross-Platform Low-Bit Deployment on Edge NPUs |
| topic | Machine Learning |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15300 |