SeVeDo: A Heterogeneous Transformer Accelerator for Low-Bit Inference via Hierarchical Group Quantization and SVD-Guided Mixed Precision

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Hauptverfasser: Choi, Yuseon, Kim, Sangjin, Oh, Jungjun, Kim, Byeongcheol, Yoo, Hoi-Jun
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Choi, Yuseon
Kim, Sangjin
Oh, Jungjun
Kim, Byeongcheol
Yoo, Hoi-Jun
author_facet Choi, Yuseon
Kim, Sangjin
Oh, Jungjun
Kim, Byeongcheol
Yoo, Hoi-Jun
contents Low-bit quantization is a promising technique for efficient transformer inference by reducing computational and memory overhead. However, aggressive bitwidth reduction remains challenging due to activation outliers, leading to accuracy degradation. Existing methods, such as outlier-handling and group quantization, achieve high accuracy but incur substantial energy consumption. To address this, we propose SeVeDo, an energy-efficient SVD-based heterogeneous accelerator that structurally separates outlier-sensitive components into a high-precision low-rank path, while the remaining computations are executed in a low-bit residual datapath with group quantization. To further enhance efficiency, Hierarchical Group Quantization (HGQ) combines coarse-grained floating-point scaling with fine-grained shifting, effectively reducing dequantization cost. Also, SVD-guided mixed precision (SVD-MP) statically allocates higher bitwidths to precision-sensitive components identified through low-rank decomposition, thereby minimizing floating-point operation cost. Experimental results show that SeVeDo achieves a peak energy efficiency of 13.8TOPS/W, surpassing conventional designs, with 12.7TOPS/W on ViT-Base and 13.4TOPS/W on Llama2-7B benchmarks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_12930
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SeVeDo: A Heterogeneous Transformer Accelerator for Low-Bit Inference via Hierarchical Group Quantization and SVD-Guided Mixed Precision
Choi, Yuseon
Kim, Sangjin
Oh, Jungjun
Kim, Byeongcheol
Yoo, Hoi-Jun
Machine Learning
Hardware Architecture
Low-bit quantization is a promising technique for efficient transformer inference by reducing computational and memory overhead. However, aggressive bitwidth reduction remains challenging due to activation outliers, leading to accuracy degradation. Existing methods, such as outlier-handling and group quantization, achieve high accuracy but incur substantial energy consumption. To address this, we propose SeVeDo, an energy-efficient SVD-based heterogeneous accelerator that structurally separates outlier-sensitive components into a high-precision low-rank path, while the remaining computations are executed in a low-bit residual datapath with group quantization. To further enhance efficiency, Hierarchical Group Quantization (HGQ) combines coarse-grained floating-point scaling with fine-grained shifting, effectively reducing dequantization cost. Also, SVD-guided mixed precision (SVD-MP) statically allocates higher bitwidths to precision-sensitive components identified through low-rank decomposition, thereby minimizing floating-point operation cost. Experimental results show that SeVeDo achieves a peak energy efficiency of 13.8TOPS/W, surpassing conventional designs, with 12.7TOPS/W on ViT-Base and 13.4TOPS/W on Llama2-7B benchmarks.
title SeVeDo: A Heterogeneous Transformer Accelerator for Low-Bit Inference via Hierarchical Group Quantization and SVD-Guided Mixed Precision
topic Machine Learning
Hardware Architecture
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.12930