Papers › HMQ: Hardware Friendly Mixed Precision Quantization Block for CNNs

HMQ: Hardware Friendly Mixed Precision Quantization Block for CNNs

20 Jul 2020ECCV 2020 8arXiv:2007.09952archive 2025-07-28

Hai Victor Habi, Roy H. Jennings, Arnon Netzer

Recent work in network quantization produced state-of-the-art results using mixed precision quantization. An imperative requirement for many efficient edge device hardware implementations is that their quantizers are uniform and with power-of-two thresholds. In this work, we introduce the Hardware Friendly Mixed Precision Quantization Block (HMQ) in order to meet this requirement. The HMQ is a mixed precision quantization block that repurposes the Gumbel-Softmax estimator into a smooth estimator of a pair of quantization parameters, namely, bit-width and threshold. HMQs use this to search over a finite space of quantization schemes. Empirically, we apply HMQs to quantize classification models trained on CIFAR10 and ImageNet. For ImageNet, we quantize four different architectures and show that, in spite of the added restrictions to our quantization scheme, we achieve competitive and, in some cases, state-of-the-art results.

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Tasks

Quantization

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Quantization ImageNet EfficientNet-B0-W8A8 Activation bits 8 #13 of 27 Archive leaderboard report
Quantization ImageNet EfficientNet-B0-W8A8 Top-1 Accuracy (%) 76.4 #13 of 27 Archive leaderboard report
Quantization ImageNet EfficientNet-B0-W8A8 Weight bits 8 #13 of 27 Archive leaderboard report
Quantization ImageNet EfficientNet-B0-W4A4 Activation bits 4 #14 of 27 Archive leaderboard report
Quantization ImageNet EfficientNet-B0-W4A4 Top-1 Accuracy (%) 76 #14 of 27 Archive leaderboard report
Quantization ImageNet EfficientNet-B0-W4A4 Weight bits 4 #14 of 27 Archive leaderboard report
Quantization ImageNet ResNet50-W3A4 Activation bits 4 #15 of 27 Archive leaderboard report
Quantization ImageNet ResNet50-W3A4 Top-1 Accuracy (%) 75.45 #15 of 27 Archive leaderboard report
Quantization ImageNet ResNet50-W3A4 Weight bits 3 #15 of 27 Archive leaderboard report
Quantization ImageNet MobileNetV2 Top-1 Accuracy (%) 70.9 #24 of 27 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

Gumbel SoftmaxRAdam

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