Dual Grained Quantization: Efficient Fine-Grained Quantization for LLM

Large Language Models (LLMs) pose significant hardware challenges related to memory requirements and computational ability. There are two mainstream quantization schemes for LLMs: coarse-grained ($e.g.,$ channel-wise) quantization and fine-grained ($e.g.,$ group-wise) quantization. Fine-grained quantization has smaller quantization loss, consequently achieving superior performance.

However, when applied to weight-activation quantization, it disrupts continuous integer matrix multiplication, leading to inefficient inference. In this paper, we introduce Dual Grained Quantization (DGQ), a novel A8W4 quantization for LLM that maintains superior performance while ensuring fast inference speed.

DSQ dequantizes the fine-grained INT4 weight into coarse-grained INT8 representation and preform matrix multiplication using INT8 kernels. Besides, we develop a two-phase grid search algorithm to simplify the determination of fine-grained and coarse-grained quantization scales.

We also devise a percentile clipping schema for smoothing the activation outliers without the need for complex optimization techniques. Experimental results demonstrate that DGQ consistently outperforms prior methods across various LLM architectures and a wide range of tasks.

Remarkably, by our implemented efficient CUTLASS kernel, we achieve $1.12$ $\times$ memory reduction and $3.24$ $\times$ speed gains comparing A16W4 implementation. These advancements enable efficient deployment of A8W4 LLMs for real-world applications.