StatQAT: Statistical Quantizer Optimization for Deep Networks

Abstract

Quantization is essential for reducing the computational cost and memory usage of deep neural networks, enabling efficient inference on low-precision hardware. Despite the growing adoption of uniform and floating-point quantization schemes, selecting optimal quantization parameters remains a key challenge, particularly for diverse data distributions encountered during training and inference. This work presents a novel statistical error analysis framework for uniform and floating-point quantization, providing theoretical insight into error behavior across quantization configurations. Building on this analysis, we propose iterative quantizers designed for arbitrary data distributions and analytic quantizers tailored for Gaussian-like weight distributions. These methods enable efficient, low-error quantization suitable for both activations and weights. We incorporate our quantizers into quantization-aware training and evaluate them across integer and floating-point formats. Experiments demonstrate improved accuracy and stability, highlighting the effectiveness of our approach for training low-precision neural networks.