arXiv · 2510.19760
Adaptive Distribution-aware Quantization for Mixed-Precision Neural Networks
Abstract
Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) is a critical technique for deploying deep neural networks on resource-constrained devices. However, existing methods often face two major challenges: the highly non-uniform distribution of activations and the static, mismatched codebooks used in weight quantization. To address these challenges, we propose Adaptive Distribution-aware Quantization (ADQ), a mixed-precision quantization framework that employs a differentiated strategy. The core of ADQ is a novel adaptive weight quantization scheme comprising three key innovations: (1) a quantile-based initialization method that constructs a codebook closely aligned with the initial weight distribution; (2) an online codebook adaptation mechanism based on Exponential Moving Average (EMA) to dynamically track distributional shifts; and (3) a sensitivity-informed strategy for mixed-precision allocation. For activations, we integrate a hardware-friendly non-uniform-to-uniform mapping scheme. Comprehensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our method. On ImageNet, ADQ enables a ResNet-18 to achieve 71.512% Top-1 accuracy with an average bit-width of only 2.81 bits, outperforming state-of-the-art methods under comparable conditions. Furthermore, detailed ablation studies on CIFAR-10 systematically demonstrate the individual contributions of each innovative component, validating the rationale and effectiveness of our design.
Explore related subjects
Keep this discovery
Shaohang Jia, Zhiyong Huang, Zhi Yu, Mingyang Hou, Shuai Miao, Han Yang. 2025-10-22. Adaptive Distribution-aware Quantization for Mixed-Precision Neural Networks. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.19760
Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.