qonnx 1.0.0
Frontend and utilities for QONNX
License: Apache-2.0

# QONNX: Arbitrary-Precision Quantized Neural Networks in ONNX

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<img align="left" src="https://xilinx.github.io/finn/img/TFC_1W2A.onnx.png" alt="QONNX example" style="margin-right: 20px" width="200"/>


QONNX (Quantized ONNX) introduces several [custom operators](docs/qonnx-custom-ops/overview.md) -- `IntQuant`, `FloatQuant`, `BipolarQuant`, and `Trunc` -- in order to represent arbitrary-precision integer and minifloat quantization in ONNX. This enables:
* Representation of binary, ternary, 3-bit, 4-bit, 6-bit or any other integer/fixed-point quantization.
* Representation of minifloat quantization with configurable exponent and mantissa bits.
* Quantization is an operator itself, and can be applied to any parameter or layer input.
* Flexible choices for scaling factor and zero-point granularity, also enabling [OCP MX datatypes](https://www.opencompute.org/documents/ocp-microscaling-formats-mx-v1-0-spec-final-pdf).
* Quantized values are carried using standard `float` datatypes to remain ONNX protobuf-compatible.

This repository contains a set of Python utilities to work with QONNX models, including but not limited to:
* executing QONNX models for (slow) functional verification
* shape inference, constant folding and other basic optimizations
* summarizing the inference cost of a QONNX model in terms of mixed-precision MACs, parameter and activation volume
* Python infrastructure for writing transformations and defining executable, shape-inferencable custom ops
* (experimental) data layout conversion from standard ONNX NCHW to custom QONNX NHWC ops

## Quickstart

### Operator definitions

Please see the [custom operator overview](docs/qonnx-custom-ops/overview.md) table for more details.

### Installation

`pip install qonnx`

### Export, Import and Model Zoo

The following quantization-aware training (QAT) frameworks support exporting to QONNX:

* [Brevitas](https://github.com/Xilinx/brevitas)
* [QKeras](https://github.com/google/qkeras) - note: QKeras to QONNX conversion will be moved to another repository. Please use the older version `qonnx==0.4` until this is done.
* [HAWQ](https://github.com/Zhen-Dong/HAWQ/tree/main/utils/export)
* [<your NN quantization framework here? please get in touch!>](https://github.com/fastmachinelearning/qonnx/discussions)

The following NN inference frameworks support importing QONNX models for deployment:

* [FINN](https://github.com/Xilinx/finn) (FPGA dataflow-style)
* [hls4ml](https://github.com/fastmachinelearning/hls4ml) (FPGA dataflow-style)
* [<your NN deployment framework here? please get in touch!>](https://github.com/fastmachinelearning/qonnx/discussions)

Head to the [QONNX model zoo](https://github.com/fastmachinelearning/QONNX_model_zoo) to download pre-trained QONNX models on various datasets.

### Model Visualization

We recommend [Netron](https://netron.app/) for visualizing QONNX models.

### Executing ONNX graph with QONNX custom nodes

Using the `qonnx-exec` command line utility, with top-level inputs supplied from `in0.npy` and `in1.npy`:

`qonnx-exec my-qonnx-model.onnx in0.npy in1.npy`

Using the Python API:

```
from qonnx.core.modelwrapper import ModelWrapper
from qonnx.core.onnx_exec import execute_onnx

model = ModelWrapper("my-qonnx-model.onnx")
idict = {"in0" : np.load("in0.npy), "in1" : np.load("in1.npy")}
odict = execute_onnx(idict)
```

### Calculate inference cost for QONNX model

Using the `qonnx-inference-cost` command line utility for the [CNV_2W2A example](https://github.com/fastmachinelearning/qonnx_model_zoo/tree/main/models/CIFAR10/Brevitas_FINN_CNV):

`qonnx-inference-cost CNV_2W2A.onnx`

Which will print a inference cost dictionary like the following:

```
Inference cost for CNV_2W2A.onnx
{
  "discount_sparsity": true,    # discount MAC counts by layer sparsity (disregard zero-valued MACs and params)
  # mem_o_X: number of layer outputs with datatype X
  "mem_o_INT32": 142602.0,       # number of INT32 output elements
  # mem_o_X: number of layer parameters (weights) with datatype X
  "mem_w_INT2": 908033.0,      # number of INT2 parameters (weights)
  # op_mac_X_Y: number of MAC operations, datatype X by datatype Y
  # scaled integer datatypes have a tensor- or channelwise scale factor
  "op_mac_SCALEDINT<8>_INT2": 1345500.0, # number of scaled int8 x int2 MACs
  "op_mac_INT2_INT2": 35615771.0,   # number of int2 x int2 MACs
  "total_bops": 163991084.0,        # total number of MACs normalized to bit-ops (BOPS)
  "total_mem_o_bits": 4563264.0,    # total number of bits for layer outputs
  "total_mem_w_bits": 1816066.0,    # total number of bits for layer parameters
  "unsupported": "set()"
}
```

You can use the `--cost-breakdown` option to generate a more detailed report that covers per-node (by name) and per-op-type information.
You can read more about the BOPS metric in [this paper](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frai.2021.676564/full), Section 4.2 Bit Operations.

### Convert between different quantization representations

Using the `qonnx-convert` command line utility you can convert from QONNX to QCDQ-style quantization:

`qonnx-convert CNV_2W2A.onnx`

This will convert `Quant` nodes to `QuantizeLinear -> Clip -> DequantizeLinear` nodes where possible.
Please see the documentation of the `QuantToQCDQ` transformation to learn more about the limitations.

## Development

Install in editable mode in a Python virtual environment:

```
git clone https://github.com/fastmachinelearning/qonnx
cd qonnx
virtualenv -p python3.10 venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install --upgrade pip
pip install -e .[testing]
```

### Running tests

Run entire test suite, parallelized across CPU cores:
```
pytest -n auto --verbose
```

Run a particular test and fall into pdb if it fails:
```
pytest --pdb -k "test_extend_partition.py::test_extend_partition[extend_id1-2]"
```

### Linting

If you plan to make pull requests to the qonnx repo, linting will be required.
We use a pre-commit hook to auto-format Python code and check for issues. See https://pre-commit.com/ for installation. Once you have `pre-commit`,
you can install the hooks into your local clone of the qonnx repo:

```
cd qonnx
source venv/bin/activate
pip install pre-commit
pre-commit install
```

Every time you commit some code, the pre-commit hooks will first run, performing various checks and fixes. In some cases pre-commit won’t be able to
fix the issues and you may have to fix it manually, then run git commit once again. The checks are configured in .pre-commit-config.yaml under the repo root.

## Why QONNX?

The QONNX representation has several advantages compared to other alternatives, as summarized in the table below.
These include a compact but flexible, single-node quantization representation that avoids operator duplication
and can support arbitrary precision up to the container datatype limit.

<img align="left" src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fastmachinelearning/qonnx/main/docs/qonnx-comparison.png" alt="QONNX comparison table" style="margin-right: 20px" />

## Community

The QONNX efforts were started by the FINN and hls4ml communities working together to create a common, arbitrary-precision representation that both frameworks could ingest. However, QONNX aims to build an open-source community for practitioners and researchers working with mixed-precision quantized neural networks by providing useful tools and a [discussion forum](https://github.com/fastmachinelearning/qonnx/discussions).

<div>
<img src=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Xilinx/finn/github-pages/docs/img/finn-logo.png height=100/>
<img src="https://fastmachinelearning.github.io/hls4ml/img/logo.jpg" alt="hls4ml" height="128"/>
</div>

## Resources

You can read more about QONNX in [this paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.07527). If you find QONNX useful in your work, please consider citing:

```bibtex
@inproceedings{Pappalardo:2022nxk,
    author = "Pappalardo, Alessandro and Umuroglu, Yaman and Blott, Michaela and Mitrevski, Jovan and Hawks, Ben and Tran, Nhan and Loncar, Vladimir and Summers, Sioni and Borras, Hendrik and Muhizi, Jules and Trahms, Matthew and Hsu, Shih-Chieh Hsu and Hauck, Scott and Duarte, Javier"
    title = "{QONNX: Representing Arbitrary-Precision Quantized Neural Networks}",
    booktitle = "{4th Workshop on Accelerated Machine Learning (AccML) at HiPEAC 2022 Conference}",
    eprint = "2206.07527",
    archivePrefix = "arXiv",
    primaryClass = "cs.LG",
    reportNumber = "FERMILAB-CONF-22-471-SCD",
    month = "6",
    year = "2022",
    url = "https://accml.dcs.gla.ac.uk/papers/2022/4thAccML_paper_1(12).pdf"
}

@software{yaman_umuroglu_2023_7622236,
  author       = "Umuroglu, Yaman and Borras, Hendrik and Loncar, Vladimir, and Summers, Sioni and Duarte, Javier",
  title        = "fastmachinelearning/qonnx",
  month        = {06},
  year         = 2022,
  publisher    = {Zenodo},
  doi          = {10.5281/zenodo.7622236},
  url          = {https://github.com/fastmachinelearning/qonnx}
}
```