Papers › LSQ+: Improving low-bit quantization through learnable offsets and better initialization

LSQ+: Improving low-bit quantization through learnable offsets and better initialization

20 Apr 2020arXiv:2004.09576archive 2025-07-28

Yash Bhalgat, Jinwon Lee, Markus Nagel, Tijmen Blankevoort, Nojun Kwak

Unlike ReLU, newer activation functions (like Swish, H-swish, Mish) that are frequently employed in popular efficient architectures can also result in negative activation values, with skewed positive and negative ranges. Typical learnable quantization schemes [PACT, LSQ] assume unsigned quantization for activations and quantize all negative activations to zero which leads to significant loss in performance. Naively using signed quantization to accommodate these negative values requires an extra sign bit which is expensive for low-bit (2-, 3-, 4-bit) quantization. To solve this problem, we propose LSQ+, a natural extension of LSQ, wherein we introduce a general asymmetric quantization scheme with trainable scale and offset parameters that can learn to accommodate the negative activations. Gradient-based learnable quantization schemes also commonly suffer from high instability or variance in the final training performance, hence requiring a great deal of hyper-parameter tuning to reach a satisfactory performance. LSQ+ alleviates this problem by using an MSE-based initialization scheme for the quantization parameters. We show that this initialization leads to significantly lower variance in final performance across multiple training runs. Overall, LSQ+ shows state-of-the-art results for EfficientNet and MixNet and also significantly outperforms LSQ for low-bit quantization of neural nets with Swish activations (e.g.: 1.8% gain with W4A4 quantization and upto 5.6% gain with W2A2 quantization of EfficientNet-B0 on ImageNet dataset). To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first work to quantize such architectures to extremely low bit-widths.

Code

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

10 samples harvested; 3 ran; 2 honoured the contract we drafted; 7 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.

Licence: 10 of the 10 samples are pointer only, meaning Syntology does not serve that copy's text. This page shows no code text for any sample; each one links to its file in the repository.

Harvested from yashbhalgat/QualcommAI-MicroNet-submission-MixNet. Some samples are identical code Syntology first harvested from another repository; for those, this paper's copy is not located and its licence is not recorded. “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized input. It does not mean the output is correct, and nothing here reproduces the paper's results. “Honoured” and “violated” refer to a contract Syntology drafted from the code itself; “our draft was wrong” and “fixture could not drive it” are failures of Syntology's instrument, not of the code.

Each sample ends with its code_sha256, Syntology's identity for that exact code. An agent fetches the stored sample with Syntology's MCP tool get_code(code_sha256="…") (how to connect); click an identity to copy that call.

Repository labels, per sample. official repository: The archive marks this repository official for the paper. named in the paper: The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official. community (archive-listed): In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper. found in paper text by Syntology: Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted. community: Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested. Samples from a repository marked official are listed first. Licence labels name the repository's licence as recorded at harvest. “Pointer only” means Syntology does not serve that copy's text, for one of four reasons: no licence file was found; the licence was not identified; the licence is recorded as permissive but that copy's record is not marked cleared; or the licence is outside the permissive list Syntology serves text under (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD and similar). Some licences outside that list permit redistribution, such as WTFPL, and GPL-3.0 under its conditions; they are simply not on the list. Hover a licence label for the reason. File links open the file on GitHub at the default branch, which may have changed since the harvest.

Tasks

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

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

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections