Data-Free Group-Wise Fully Quantized Winograd Convolution via Learnable Scales

TL;DR

This paper introduces a data-free, group-wise quantization method for Winograd convolution in diffusion models, enabling near-lossless inference quality and improved accuracy without domain-specific training.

Contribution

It proposes finetuning only the scale parameters of Winograd matrices for fully quantized convolution, avoiding training data dependence and enhancing model performance.

Findings

Achieves near-lossless quality in text-to-image generation with 8-bit quantization.

Outperforms state-of-the-art Winograd PTQ in ImageNet classification accuracy.

Enables efficient, high-quality diffusion model inference without additional training data.

Abstract

Despite the revolutionary breakthroughs of large-scale text-to-image diffusion models for complex vision and downstream tasks, their extremely high computational and storage costs limit their usability. Quantization of diffusion models has been explored in recent works to reduce compute costs and memory bandwidth usage. To further improve inference time, fast convolution algorithms such as Winograd can be used for convolution layers, which account for a significant portion of computations in diffusion models. However, the significant quality loss of fully quantized Winograd using existing coarser-grained post-training quantization methods, combined with the complexity and cost of finetuning the Winograd transformation matrices for such large models to recover quality, makes them unsuitable for large-scale foundation models. Motivated by the presence of a large range of values in them, we investigate the impact of finer-grained group-wise quantization in quantizing diffusion models. While group-wise quantization can largely handle the fully quantized Winograd convolution, it struggles to deal with the large distribution imbalance in a sizable portion of the Winograd domain computation. To reduce range differences in the Winograd domain, we propose finetuning only the scale parameters of the Winograd transform matrices without using any domain-specific training data. Because our method does not depend on any training data, the generalization performance of quantized diffusion models is safely guaranteed. For text-to-image generation task, the 8-bit fully-quantized diffusion model with Winograd provides near-lossless quality (FID and CLIP scores) in comparison to the full-precision model. For image classification, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art Winograd PTQ method by 1.62% and 2.56% in top-1 ImageNet accuracy on ResNet18 and ResNet-34, respectively, with Winograd F(6, 3).