FireQ: Fast INT4-FP8 Kernel and RoPE-aware Quantization for LLM Inference Acceleration

TL;DR

FireQ introduces a co-designed INT4-FP8 quantization framework and optimized kernels that significantly accelerate large language model inference while maintaining accuracy, addressing memory bandwidth constraints effectively.

Contribution

The paper presents FireQ, a novel PTQ framework with a specialized INT4-FP8 kernel and techniques for RoPE-aware quantization, improving inference speed and efficiency for LLMs.

Findings

Achieves 1.68x faster FNN inference on Llama2-7B.

Attains 1.26x faster prefill on Llama3-8B.

Maintains negligible accuracy loss.

Abstract

As large language models become increasingly prevalent, memory bandwidth constraints significantly limit inference throughput, motivating post-training quantization (PTQ). In this paper, we propose FireQ, a co-designed PTQ framework and an INT4-FP8 matrix multiplication kernel that accelerates LLM inference across all linear layers. Specifically, FireQ quantizes linear layer weights and key-values to INT4, and activations and queries to FP8, significantly enhancing throughput. Additionally, we introduce a three-stage pipelining for the prefill phase, which modifies the FlashAttention-3 kernel, effectively reducing time-to-first-token in the prefill phase. To minimize accuracy loss from quantization, we develop novel outlier smoothing techniques tailored separately for linear and attention layers. In linear layers, we explicitly use per-tensor scaling to prevent underflow caused by the FP8 quantization scaling factor of INT4 quantization, and channel-wise scaling to compensate for coarse granularity of INT4. In attention layers, we address quantization challenges posed by rotary positional embeddings (RoPE) by combining pre-RoPE and post-RoPE scaling strategies. FireQ significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving 1.68x faster inference in feed-forward network layers on Llama2-7B and 1.26x faster prefill phase performance on Llama3-8B compared to QServe, with negligible accuracy loss.