This paper introduces an efficient Vision-Language Model (VLM) pipeline specifically optimized for deployment on embedded devices, such as those used in robotics and autonomous driving. The pipeline significantly reduces the computational overhead by jointly leveraging patch selection to filter irrelevant camera views, a token selection module to reduce input sequence length for the LLM, and speculative decoding to accelerate token generation. Evaluation on the NVIDIA DRIVE Thor platform for automonous driving application, our pipeline achieves $2.5\times$ end-to-end latency reduction without compromising task accuracy. The speed-up further increases to $3.2\times$ when applying FP8 post-training quantization. These results demonstrate our pipeline as a viable solution for enabling real-time VLM deployment in resource-constrained environments.
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have revitalized philosophical debates surrounding artificial intelligence. Two of the most fundamental challenges - namely, the Frame Problem and the Symbol Grounding Problem - have historically been viewed as unsolvable within traditional symbolic AI systems. This study investigates whether modern LLMs possess the cognitive capacities required to address these problems. To do so, I designed two benchmark tasks reflecting the philosophical core of each problem, administered them under zero-shot conditions to 13 prominent LLMs (both closed and open-source), and assessed the quality of the models' outputs across five trials each. Responses were scored along multiple criteria, including contextual reasoning, semantic coherence, and information filtering. The results demonstrate that while open-source models showed variability in performance due to differences in model size, quantization, and instruction tuning, several closed models consistently achieved high scores. These findings suggest that select modern LLMs may be acquiring capacities sufficient to produce meaningful and stable responses to these long-standing theoretical challenges.
This work addresses a fundamental barrier in recommender systems: the inability to generalize across domains without extensive retraining. Traditional ID-based approaches fail entirely in cold-start and cross-domain scenarios where new users or items lack sufficient interaction history. Inspired by foundation models' cross-domain success, we develop a foundation model for sequential recommendation that achieves genuine zero-shot generalization capabilities. Our approach fundamentally departs from existing ID-based methods by deriving item representations exclusively from textual features. This enables immediate embedding of any new item without model retraining. We introduce unified item tokenization with Finite Scalar Quantization that transforms heterogeneous textual descriptions into standardized discrete tokens. This eliminates domain barriers that plague existing systems. Additionally, the framework features hybrid bidirectional-causal attention that captures both intra-item token coherence and inter-item sequential dependencies. An efficient catalog-aware beam search decoder enables real-time token-to-item mapping. Unlike conventional approaches confined to their training domains, RecGPT naturally bridges diverse recommendation contexts through its domain-invariant tokenization mechanism. Comprehensive evaluations across six datasets and industrial scenarios demonstrate consistent performance advantages.
Monocular Depth Estimation (MDE) has emerged as a pivotal task in computer vision, supporting numerous real-world applications. However, deploying accurate depth estimation models on resource-limited edge devices, especially Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs), is challenging due to the high computational and memory demands. Recent advancements in foundational depth estimation deliver impressive results but further amplify the difficulty of deployment on ASICs. To address this, we propose QuartDepth which adopts post-training quantization to quantize MDE models with hardware accelerations for ASICs. Our approach involves quantizing both weights and activations to 4-bit precision, reducing the model size and computation cost. To mitigate the performance degradation, we introduce activation polishing and compensation algorithm applied before and after activation quantization, as well as a weight reconstruction method for minimizing errors in weight quantization. Furthermore, we design a flexible and programmable hardware accelerator by supporting kernel fusion and customized instruction programmability, enhancing throughput and efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework achieves competitive accuracy while enabling fast inference and higher energy efficiency on ASICs, bridging the gap between high-performance depth estimation and practical edge-device applicability. Code: https://github.com/shawnricecake/quart-depth
We present the B-spline Encoded Action Sequence Tokenizer (BEAST), a novel action tokenizer that encodes action sequences into compact discrete or continuous tokens using B-splines. In contrast to existing action tokenizers based on vector quantization or byte pair encoding, BEAST requires no separate tokenizer training and consistently produces tokens of uniform length, enabling fast action sequence generation via parallel decoding. Leveraging our B-spline formulation, BEAST inherently ensures generating smooth trajectories without discontinuities between adjacent segments. We extensively evaluate BEAST by integrating it with three distinct model architectures: a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) with continuous tokens, a decoder-only Transformer with discrete tokens, and Florence-2, a pretrained Vision-Language Model with an encoder-decoder architecture, demonstrating BEAST's compatibility and scalability with large pretrained models. We evaluate BEAST across three established benchmarks consisting of 166 simulated tasks and on three distinct robot settings with a total of 8 real-world tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that BEAST (i) significantly reduces both training and inference computational costs, and (ii) consistently generates smooth, high-frequency control signals suitable for continuous control tasks while (iii) reliably achieves competitive task success rates compared to state-of-the-art methods.
As API access becomes a primary interface to large language models (LLMs), users often interact with black-box systems that offer little transparency into the deployed model. To reduce costs or maliciously alter model behaviors, API providers may discreetly serve quantized or fine-tuned variants, which can degrade performance and compromise safety. Detecting such substitutions is difficult, as users lack access to model weights and, in most cases, even output logits. To tackle this problem, we propose a rank-based uniformity test that can verify the behavioral equality of a black-box LLM to a locally deployed authentic model. Our method is accurate, query-efficient, and avoids detectable query patterns, making it robust to adversarial providers that reroute or mix responses upon the detection of testing attempts. We evaluate the approach across diverse threat scenarios, including quantization, harmful fine-tuning, jailbreak prompts, and full model substitution, showing that it consistently achieves superior statistical power over prior methods under constrained query budgets.
The increasing complexity of AI models requires flexible hardware capable of supporting diverse precision formats, particularly for energy-constrained edge platforms. This work presents PARV-CE, a SIMD-enabled, multi-precision MAC engine that performs efficient multiply-accumulate operations using a unified data-path for 4/8/16-bit fixed-point, floating point, and posit formats. The architecture incorporates a layer adaptive precision strategy to align computational accuracy with workload sensitivity, optimizing both performance and energy usage. PARV-CE integrates quantization-aware execution with a reconfigurable SIMD pipeline, enabling high-throughput processing with minimal overhead through hardware-software co-design. The results demonstrate up to 2x improvement in PDP and 3x reduction in resource usage compared to SoTA designs, while retaining accuracy within 1.8% FP32 baseline. The architecture supports both on-device training and inference across a range of workloads, including DNNs, RNNs, RL, and Transformer models. The empirical analysis establish PARVCE incorporated POLARON as a scalable and energy-efficient solution for precision-adaptive AI acceleration at edge.
The continuous improvements on image compression with variational autoencoders have lead to learned codecs competitive with conventional approaches in terms of rate-distortion efficiency. Nonetheless, taking the quantization into account during the training process remains a problem, since it produces zero derivatives almost everywhere and needs to be replaced with a differentiable approximation which allows end-to-end optimization. Though there are different methods for approximating the quantization, none of them model the quantization noise correctly and thus, result in suboptimal networks. Hence, we propose an additional finetuning training step: After conventional end-to-end training, parts of the network are retrained on quantized latents obtained at the inference stage. For entropy-constraint quantizers like Trellis-Coded Quantization, the impact of the quantizer is particularly difficult to approximate by rounding or adding noise as the quantized latents are interdependently chosen through a trellis search based on both the entropy model and a distortion measure. We show that retraining on correctly quantized data consistently yields additional coding gain for both uniform scalar and especially for entropy-constraint quantization, without increasing inference complexity. For the Kodak test set, we obtain average savings between 1% and 2%, and for the TecNick test set up to 2.2% in terms of Bj{\o}ntegaard-Delta bitrate.
Commonly used image tokenizers produce a 2D grid of spatially arranged tokens. In contrast, so-called 1D image tokenizers represent images as highly compressed one-dimensional sequences of as few as 32 discrete tokens. We find that the high degree of compression achieved by a 1D tokenizer with vector quantization enables image editing and generative capabilities through heuristic manipulation of tokens, demonstrating that even very crude manipulations -- such as copying and replacing tokens between latent representations of images -- enable fine-grained image editing by transferring appearance and semantic attributes. Motivated by the expressivity of the 1D tokenizer's latent space, we construct an image generation pipeline leveraging gradient-based test-time optimization of tokens with plug-and-play loss functions such as reconstruction or CLIP similarity. Our approach is demonstrated for inpainting and text-guided image editing use cases, and can generate diverse and realistic samples without requiring training of any generative model.
The high memory demands of the Key-Value (KV) Cache during the inference of Large Language Models (LLMs) severely restrict their deployment in resource-constrained platforms. Quantization can effectively alleviate the memory pressure caused by KV Cache. However, existing methods either rely on static one-size-fits-all precision allocation or fail to dynamically prioritize critical KV in long-context tasks, forcing memory-accuracy-throughput tradeoffs. In this work, we propose a novel mixed-precision quantization method for KV Cache named KVmix. KVmix leverages gradient-based importance analysis to evaluate how individual Key and Value projection matrices affect the model loss, enabling layer-specific bit-width allocation for mix-precision quantization. It dynamically prioritizes higher precision for important layers while aggressively quantizing less influential ones, achieving a tunable balance between accuracy and efficiency. KVmix also introduces a dynamic long-context optimization strategy that adaptively keeps full-precision KV pairs for recent pivotal tokens and compresses older ones, achieving high-quality sequence generation with low memory usage. Additionally, KVmix provides efficient low-bit quantization and CUDA kernels to optimize computational overhead. On LLMs such as Llama and Mistral, KVmix achieves near-lossless inference performance with extremely low quantization configuration (Key 2.19bit Value 2.38bit), while delivering a remarkable 4.9x memory compression and a 5.3x speedup in inference throughput.
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has outperformed other counterparts in sequential decision-making and dynamic environment control. However, FPGA deployment is significantly resource-expensive, as associated with large number of computations in training agents with high-quality images and possess new challenges. In this work, we propose QForce-RL takes benefits of quantization to enhance throughput and reduce energy footprint with light-weight RL architecture, without significant performance degradation. QForce-RL takes advantages from E2HRL to reduce overall RL actions to learn desired policy and QuaRL for quantization based SIMD for hardware acceleration. We have also provided detailed analysis for different RL environments, with emphasis on model size, parameters, and accelerated compute ops. The architecture is scalable for resource-constrained devices and provide parametrized efficient deployment with flexibility in latency, throughput, power, and energy efficiency. The proposed QForce-RL provides performance enhancement up to 2.3x and better FPS - 2.6x compared to SoTA works.
Artificial neural networks (ANNs) have demonstrated outstanding performance in numerous tasks, but deployment in resource-constrained environments remains a challenge due to their high computational and memory requirements. Spiking neural networks (SNNs) operate through discrete spike events and offer superior energy efficiency, providing a bio-inspired alternative. However, current ANN-to-SNN conversion often results in significant accuracy loss and increased inference time due to conversion errors such as clipping, quantization, and uneven activation. This paper proposes a novel ANN-to-SNN conversion framework based on error compensation learning. We introduce a learnable threshold clipping function, dual-threshold neurons, and an optimized membrane potential initialization strategy to mitigate the conversion error. Together, these techniques address the clipping error through adaptive thresholds, dynamically reduce the quantization error through dual-threshold neurons, and minimize the non-uniformity error by effectively managing the membrane potential. Experimental results on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, ImageNet datasets show that our method achieves high-precision and ultra-low latency among existing conversion methods. Using only two time steps, our method significantly reduces the inference time while maintains competitive accuracy of 94.75% on CIFAR-10 dataset under ResNet-18 structure. This research promotes the practical application of SNNs on low-power hardware, making efficient real-time processing possible.
Large language models (LLMs) require substantial compute, and thus energy, at inference time. While quantizing weights and activations is effective at improving efficiency, naive quantization of LLMs can significantly degrade performance due to large magnitude outliers. This paper describes FPTQuant, which introduces four novel, lightweight, and expressive function-preserving transforms (FPTs) to facilitate quantization of transformers: (1) a mergeable pre-RoPE transform for queries and keys, (2) a mergeable transform for values, (3) a mergeable scaling transform within the MLP block, and (4) a cheap, dynamic scaling transform. By leveraging the equivariances and independencies inherent to canonical transformer operation, we designed these FPTs to maintain the model's function while shaping the intermediate activation distributions to be more quantization friendly. FPTQuant requires no custom kernels and adds virtually no overhead during inference. The FPTs are trained both locally to reduce outliers, and end-to-end such that the outputs of the quantized and full-precision models match. FPTQuant enables static INT4 quantization with minimal overhead and shows SOTA speed-up of up to 3.9 times over FP. Empirically, FPTQuant has an excellent accuracy-speed trade-off -- it is performing on par or exceeding most prior work and only shows slightly lower accuracy compared to a method that is up to 29% slower.
Vector Quantization (VQ) is a widely used technique in machine learning and data compression, valued for its simplicity and interpretability. Among hard VQ methods, $k$-medoids clustering and Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) approaches represent two prominent yet seemingly unrelated paradigms -- one distance-based, the other rooted in probability density matching. In this paper, we investigate their connection through the lens of Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO). We compare a heuristic QUBO formulation for $k$-medoids, which balances centrality and diversity, with a principled QUBO derived from minimizing Maximum Mean Discrepancy in KDE-based VQ. Surprisingly, we show that the KDE-QUBO is a special case of the $k$-medoids-QUBO under mild assumptions on the kernel's feature map. This reveals a deeper structural relationship between these two approaches and provides new insight into the geometric interpretation of the weighting parameters used in QUBO formulations for VQ.
The rapid development of deep learning has led to challenges in deploying neural networks on edge devices, mainly due to their high memory and runtime complexity. Network compression techniques, such as quantization and pruning, aim to reduce this complexity while maintaining accuracy. However, existing incremental verification methods often focus only on quantization and struggle with structural changes. This paper presents MUC-G4 (Minimal Unsat Core-Guided Incremental Verification), a novel framework for incremental verification of compressed deep neural networks. It encodes both the original and compressed networks into SMT formulas, classifies changes, and use \emph{Minimal Unsat Cores (MUCs)} from the original network to guide efficient verification for the compressed network. Experimental results show its effectiveness in handling quantization and pruning, with high proof reuse rates and significant speedup in verification time compared to traditional methods. MUC-G4 hence offers a promising solution for ensuring the safety and reliability of compressed neural networks in practical applications.
The key-value (KV) cache in transformer models is a critical component for efficient decoding or inference, yet its memory demands scale poorly with sequence length, posing a major challenge for scalable deployment of large language models. Among several approaches to KV cache compression, quantization of key and value activations has been widely explored. Most KV cache quantization methods still need to manage sparse and noncontiguous outliers separately. To address this, we introduce TaDA, a training-free recipe for KV cache compression with quantization precision that adapts to error sensitivity across layers and a mean centering to eliminate separate outlier handling. Our approach yields substantial accuracy improvements for multiple models supporting various context lengths. Moreover, our approach does not need to separately manage outlier elements -- a persistent hurdle in most traditional quantization methods. Experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that our technique reduces KV cache memory footprint to 27% of the original 16-bit baseline while achieving comparable accuracy. Our method paves the way for scalable and high-performance reasoning in language models by potentially enabling inference for longer context length models, reasoning models, and longer chain of thoughts.
Diffusion generative models have become the standard for producing high-quality, coherent video content, yet their slow inference speeds and high computational demands hinder practical deployment. Although both quantization and sparsity can independently accelerate inference while maintaining generation quality, naively combining these techniques in existing training-free approaches leads to significant performance degradation due to the lack of joint optimization. We introduce FPSAttention, a novel training-aware co-design of FP8 quantization and sparsity for video generation, with a focus on the 3D bi-directional attention mechanism. Our approach features three key innovations: 1) A unified 3D tile-wise granularity that simultaneously supports both quantization and sparsity; 2) A denoising step-aware strategy that adapts to the noise schedule, addressing the strong correlation between quantization/sparsity errors and denoising steps; 3) A native, hardware-friendly kernel that leverages FlashAttention and is implemented with optimized Hopper architecture features for highly efficient execution. Trained on Wan2.1's 1.3B and 14B models and evaluated on the VBench benchmark, FPSAttention achieves a 7.09x kernel speedup for attention operations and a 4.96x end-to-end speedup for video generation compared to the BF16 baseline at 720p resolution-without sacrificing generation quality.
This paper addressed with the quantized dissipative uncertain problem for delayed fractional T_S Fuzzy system for event_triggered networked systems (E_NS), where the extended dissipativity analysis combines the H infinity, dissipativity, L2 and L infinity and passivity performance in a unified frame. To attain the high efficiency for available channel resources, measurement size decrease mechanism and event_triggered scheme (ETS) are proposed. Firstly, we present the ETS in which signal is transmitted through the channel with logical function then logarithmic quantization methodology is implemented for size reduction. Then, we transfer the original delayed fractional T_S fuzzy systems with the effect of quantization under ETS as induced communications delays. Furthermore, by employing the associative Lyapunov functional method in terms of linear matrix inequalities, adequate conditions for asymptotical stability is given. Moreover, we also construct the design fuzzy model for state space filtering system. At last, a truck_trailer model is given to show the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.
This paper proposes a highly compact, lightweight text-to-speech (TTS) model for on-device applications. To reduce the model size, the proposed model introduces two techniques. First, we introduce quantization-aware training (QAT), which quantizes model parameters during training to as low as 1.58-bit. In this case, most of 32-bit model parameters are quantized to ternary values {-1, 0, 1}. Second, we propose a method named weight indexing. In this method, we save a group of 1.58-bit weights as a single int8 index. This allows for efficient storage of model parameters, even on hardware that treats values in units of 8-bit. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieved 83 % reduction in model size, while outperforming the baseline of similar model size without quantization in synthesis quality.
Automated Audio Captioning (AAC) aims to describe the semantic contexts of general sounds, including acoustic events and scenes, by leveraging effective acoustic features. To enhance performance, an AAC method, EnCLAP, employed discrete tokens from EnCodec as an effective input for fine-tuning a language model BART. However, EnCodec is designed to reconstruct waveforms rather than capture the semantic contexts of general sounds, which AAC should describe. To address this issue, we propose CLAP-ART, an AAC method that utilizes ``semantic-rich and discrete'' tokens as input. CLAP-ART computes semantic-rich discrete tokens from pre-trained audio representations through vector quantization. We experimentally confirmed that CLAP-ART outperforms baseline EnCLAP on two AAC benchmarks, indicating that semantic-rich discrete tokens derived from semantically rich AR are beneficial for AAC.