RoMeo: Mitigating Dual-dimensional Outliers with Rotated Mixed Precision Quantization
Mixed precision quantization has been adopted to accelerate large language models (LLMs) serving by leveraging high-throughput low-precision compute units in GPUs while preserving outliers in higher precision to maintain model accuracy. However, existing methods focus on mitigating single-dimensional channel-wise outliers, leading to model accuracy degradation when scaled to 4-bit precision.
In this paper, we present an algorithm-system co-design to effectively handle dual-dimensional outliers across both channel and token dimensions in LLMs. We introduce a novel rotation-based mixed precision quantization algorithm that suppresses and migrates channel-wise outliers to the token dimension. Based on this algorithm, we propose RoMeo, an efficient LLM serving system designed to overcome the unique system challenges posed by sparse computation pattern and dynamic outlier detection inherent in token-wise outlier handling. Extensive evaluations across various LLMs demonstrate that RoMeo improves quantized model accuracy by up to $5.17%$ compared to state-of-the-art methods QuaRot and MixQ, while maintaining efficiency comparable to uniform precision quantizations, achieving up to $2.10 \times$ end-to-end speedup over half-precision baseline. RoMeo is available at https://github.com/thu-pacman/RoMeo.
Tue 3 FebDisplayed time zone: Hobart change
11:30 - 12:50 | Mixed Precision and QuantizationMain Conference at Balmoral Chair(s): Dingwen Tao Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences | ||
11:30 20mTalk | RoMeo: Mitigating Dual-dimensional Outliers with Rotated Mixed Precision Quantization Main Conference Qihao Zhang Tsinghua University, MingLiang Tang Tsinghua University, Mingshu Zhai Tsinghua University, Kinman Lei Tsinghua University, Jidong Zhai Tsinghua University DOI | ||
11:50 20mTalk | High-Throughput Non-Uniformly Quantized 3-bit LLM Inference Main Conference YuAng Chen Chinese University of Hong Kong, Wenqi Zeng Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Jeffrey Xu Yu Chinese University of Hong Kong DOI | ||
12:10 20mTalk | JanusQuant: Accurate and Efficient 2-bit KV Cache Quantization for Long-Context Inference Main Conference Chengyu Sun Wuhan University, Yaqi Xia Wuhan University, Hulin Wang , Donglin Yang Nvidia Corporation, Xiaobo Zhou University of Macau, Dazhao Cheng WuHan University DOI | ||
12:30 20mTalk | HierCut: Enabling 16-bit Format Mixed Precision for Molecular Dynamics through Hierarchical CutoffBest Artifact Award Main Conference zeyu song Tsinghua University, Lin Gan Tsinghua University, Xiaohui Duan Shandong University, Jiayu Fu Tsinghua University, Zhengrui Li Tsinghua University, Yinuo Wang Tsinghua University, Guangzhao Li Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guangwen Yang Tsinghua University DOI | ||