Deep neural network quantization with adaptive bitwidths has gained increasing attention due to the ease of model deployment on various platforms with different resource budgets. In this paper, we propose a meta-learning approach to achieve this goal. Specifically, we propose MEBQAT, a simple yet effective way of bitwidth-adaptive quantization aware training (QAT) where meta-learning is effectively combined with QAT by redefining meta-learning tasks to incorporate bitwidths. After being deployed on a platform, MEBQAT allows the (meta-)trained model to be quantized to any candidate bitwidth then helps to conduct inference without much accuracy drop from quantization. Moreover, with a few-shot learning scenario, MEBQAT can also adapt a model to any bitwidth as well as any unseen target classes by adding conventional optimization or metric-based meta-learning. We design variants of MEBQAT to support both (1) a bitwidth-adaptive quantization scenario and (2) a new few-shot learning scenario where both quantization bitwidths and target classes are jointly adapted. We experimentally demonstrate their validity in multiple QAT schemes. By comparing their performance to (bitwidth-dedicated) QAT, existing bitwidth adaptive QAT and vanilla meta-learning, we find that merging bitwidths into meta-learning tasks achieves a higher level of robustness.

本文提出一种元学习方法，通过重新定义元学习任务来与量化训练(QAT)相结合，实现比特宽度自适应量化的目标，并通过开发基于常规优化或度量的元学习方法，在少样本的情况下可适应任何比特宽度及目标类别。实验结果证明其在多种 QAT 方案中的有效性，在不牺牲精度的前提下，将比特宽度合并到元学习任务中可实现更高的鲁棒性。

比特宽度自适应、量化感知的神经网络训练：一种元学习方法