From Bits to Chips: An LLM-based Hardware-Aware Quantization Agent for Streamlined Deployment of LLMs

TL;DR

This paper presents HAQA, an LLM-based automated framework that simplifies hardware-aware quantization, improving deployment efficiency, accuracy, and adaptability across diverse hardware platforms.

Contribution

Introduction of HAQA, an automated LLM-powered tool that streamlines quantization and deployment, reducing manual effort and enhancing hardware adaptability.

Findings

Up to 2.3x inference speedup on Llama models.

Increased throughput and accuracy with HAQA.

Effective adaptive quantization across diverse hardware.

Abstract

Deploying models, especially large language models (LLMs), is becoming increasingly attractive to a broader user base, including those without specialized expertise. However, due to the resource constraints of certain hardware, maintaining high accuracy with larger model while meeting the hardware requirements remains a significant challenge. Model quantization technique helps mitigate memory and compute bottlenecks, yet the added complexities of tuning and deploying quantized models further exacerbates these challenges, making the process unfriendly to most of the users. We introduce the Hardware-Aware Quantization Agent (HAQA), an automated framework that leverages LLMs to streamline the entire quantization and deployment process by enabling efficient hyperparameter tuning and hardware configuration, thereby simultaneously improving deployment quality and ease of use for a broad range of users. Our results demonstrate up to a 2.3x speedup in inference, along with increased throughput and improved accuracy compared to unoptimized models on Llama. Additionally, HAQA is designed to implement adaptive quantization strategies across diverse hardware platforms, as it automatically finds optimal settings even when they appear counterintuitive, thereby reducing extensive manual effort and demonstrating superior adaptability. Code will be released.