EfficientQAT: Efficient Quantization-Aware Training for Large Language
  Models
Authors: name: Mengzhao Chen, name: Wenqi Shao, name: Peng Xu, name: Jiahao Wang, name: Peng Gao, name: Kaipeng Zhang, name: Yu Qiao, name: Ping Luo

Large language models (LLMs) are integral to modern natural language
processing and artificial intelligence. However, they face challenges in
managing their significant memory requirements. Although quantization-aware
training (QAT) offers a solution by reducing memory consumption through low-bit
representations with minimal accuracy loss, it demands substantial training
resources to optimize model weights and quantization parameters. To address
this, we propose Efficient Quantization-Aware Training (EfficientQAT), a novel
quantization technique for compressing LLMs. EfficientQAT involves two
consecutive phases: Block-wise training of all parameters (Block-AP) and
end-to-end training of quantization parameters (E2E-QP). Block-AP sequentially
conducts quantization-aware training for all parameters in each transformer
block with block-wise reconstruction, maintaining efficiency by avoiding
training the entire LLM. Initialized with quantized model, E2E-QP then trains
only quantization parameters (step sizes) end-to-end, enhancing efficiency with
a fixed quantized backbone and reduced trainable parameter count. Extensive
experiments demonstrate that EfficientQAT outperforms previous quantization
methods across a range of models, including base LLMs, instruction-tuned LLMs,
and multimodal LLMs, with scales from 7B to 70B parameters at various
quantization bits. For instance, EfficientQAT obtains a 2-bit Llama-2-70B model
on a single A100-80GB GPU in 41 hours, with less than 3\% accuracy degradation
compared to the full precision (69.48 vs. 72.41). Notably, this INT2 quantized
70B model obtains a 1.67 accuracy gain over the Llama-2-13B model (69.48 vs.
67.81) while requiring less memory (19.2GB vs. 24.2GB). Code is available at
https://github.com/OpenGVLab/EfficientQAT.