From Bits to Chips: An LLM-based Hardware-Aware Quantization Agent for Streamlined Deployment of LLMs

Deploying models, especially large language models (LLMs), is becoming increasingly attractive to a broader user base, including those without specialized expertise. However, due to the resource constraints of certain hardware, maintaining high accuracy with larger model while meeting the hardware requirements remains a significant challenge. Model quantization technique helps mitigate memory and compute bottlenecks, yet the added complexities of tuning and deploying quantized models further exacerbates these challenges, making the process unfriendly to most of the users. We introduce the Hardware-Aware Quantization Agent (HAQA), an automated framework that leverages LLMs to streamline the entire quantization and deployment process by enabling efficient hyperparameter tuning and hardware configuration, thereby simultaneously improving deployment quality and ease of use for a broad range of users. Our results demonstrate up to a 2.3x speedup in inference, along with increased throughput and improved accuracy compared to unoptimized models on Llama. Additionally, HAQA is designed to implement adaptive quantization strategies across diverse hardware platforms, as it automatically finds optimal settings even when they appear counterintuitive, thereby reducing extensive manual effort and demonstrating superior adaptability. Code will be released.

EchoMark: Perceptual Acoustic Environment Transfer with Watermark-Embedded Room Impulse Response

Acoustic Environment Matching (AEM) is the task of transferring clean audio into a target acoustic environment, enabling engaging applications such as audio dubbing and auditory immersive virtual reality (VR). Recovering similar room impulse response (RIR) directly from reverberant speech offers more accessible and flexible AEM solution. However, this capability also introduces vulnerabilities of arbitrary ``relocation" if misused by malicious user, such as facilitating advanced voice spoofing attacks or undermining the authenticity of recorded evidence. To address this issue, we propose EchoMark, the first deep learning-based AEM framework that generates perceptually similar RIRs with embedded watermark. Our design tackle the challenges posed by variable RIR characteristics, such as different durations and energy decays, by operating in the latent domain. By jointly optimizing the model with a perceptual loss for RIR reconstruction and a loss for watermark detection, EchoMark achieves both high-quality environment transfer and reliable watermark recovery. Experiments on diverse datasets validate that EchoMark achieves room acoustic parameter matching performance comparable to FiNS, the state-of-the-art RIR estimator. Furthermore, a high Mean Opinion Score (MOS) of 4.22 out of 5, watermark detection accuracy exceeding 99\%, and bit error rates (BER) below 0.3\% collectively demonstrate the effectiveness of EchoMark in preserving perceptual quality while ensuring reliable watermark embedding.