FineQ: Software-Hardware Co-Design for Low-Bit Fine-Grained Mixed-Precision Quantization of LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the natural language processing paradigm but impose substantial demands on memory and computational resources. Quantization is one of the most effective ways to reduce memory consumption of LLMs. However, advanced single-precision quantization methods experience significant accuracy degradation when quantizing to ultra-low bits. Existing mixed-precision quantization methods are quantized by groups with coarse granularity. Employing high precision for group data leads to substantial memory overhead, whereas low precision severely impacts model accuracy. To address this issue, we propose FineQ, software-hardware co-design for low-bit fine-grained mixed-precision quantization of LLMs. First, FineQ partitions the weights into finer-grained clusters and considers the distribution of outliers within these clusters, thus achieving a balance between model accuracy and memory overhead. Then, we propose an outlier protection mechanism within clusters that uses 3 bits to represent outliers and introduce an encoding scheme for index and data concatenation to enable aligned memory access. Finally, we introduce an accelerator utilizing temporal coding that effectively supports the quantization algorithm while simplifying the multipliers in the systolic array. FineQ achieves higher model accuracy compared to the SOTA mixed-precision quantization algorithm at a close average bit-width. Meanwhile, the accelerator achieves up to 1.79x energy efficiency and reduces the area of the systolic array by 61.2%.

Uneven illumination surface defects inspection based on convolutional neural network

Surface defect inspection based on machine vision is often affected by uneven illumination. In order to improve the inspection rate of surface defects inspection under uneven illumination condition, this paper proposes a method for detecting surface image defects based on convolutional neural network, which is based on the adjustment of convolutional neural networks, training parameters, changing the structure of the network, to achieve the purpose of accurately identifying various defects. Experimental on defect inspection of copper strip and steel images shows that the convolutional neural network can automatically learn features without preprocessing the image, and correct identification of various types of image defects affected by uneven illumination, thus overcoming the drawbacks of traditional machine vision inspection methods under uneven illumination.