PTQ4SAM: Post-Training Quantization for Segment Anything
Authors: Chengtao Lv, Hong Chen, Jinyang Guo, Yifu Ding, Xianglong Liu

Segment Anything Model (SAM) has achieved impressive performance in many computer vision tasks. However as a large-scale model the immense memory and computation costs hinder its practical deployment. In this paper we propose a post-training quantization (PTQ) framework for Segment Anything Model namely PTQ4SAM. First we investigate the inherent bottleneck of SAM quantization attributed to the bimodal distribution in \cls post-Key-Linear  activations. We analyze its characteristics from both per-tensor and per-channel perspectives and propose a Bimodal Integration strategy which utilizes a mathematically equivalent sign operation to transform the bimodal distribution into a relatively easy-quantized normal distribution offline. Second SAM encompasses diverse attention mechanisms (i.e. self-attention and two-way cross-attention) resulting in substantial variations in the post-Softmax distributions. Therefore we introduce an Adaptive Granularity Quantization for Softmax through searching the optimal power-of-two base which is hardware-friendly. Extensive experimental results across various vision tasks (instance segmentation semantic segmentation and object detection) datasets and model variants show the superiority of PTQ4SAM. For example when quantizing SAM-L to 6-bit we achieve lossless accuracy for instance segmentation about 0.5% drop with theoretical 3.9xacceleration. The code is available at https://github.com/chengtao-lv/PTQ4SAM.