awq-ffc475ff·2 events·first seen Aliases: AWQ
Researchers present an MLIR-based compiler pipeline for deploying large language models on AI accelerators, using two dialect layers (TopOp for framework-agnostic graph representation and TpuOp for hardware-specific lowering). The method splits each Transformer layer into three static compilation stages (prefill, prefill_kv, decode) to handle the distinct computational profiles of prompt processing and autoregressive generation. The approach is implemented in the open-source TPU-MLIR compiler and LLM-TPU project, supporting Qwen, Llama, InternVL, and MiniCPM-V families with GPTQ, AWQ, and AutoRound quantization.
This paper introduces Orthogonal Residual Projection (ORP), an algorithm-hardware co-design framework for ultra-low-bit quantization of LLMs and Vision Transformers targeting edge deployment. ORP addresses the structural limitations of Power-of-Two (PoT) quantization by formulating quantization as a dual-basis geometric projection that synthesizes higher-resolution residual lattices using only shift-and-add operations, eliminating multipliers. At 3-bit (W3/A16), ORP achieves 6.10 perplexity on LLaMA-2-7B, competitive with MAC-intensive baselines like AWQ, while reducing full-model calibration time to ~15 minutes. RTL synthesis at 28nm confirms hardware efficiency by mitigating timing bottlenecks from dense multiplier trees.