Mixed-precision quantization mostly predetermines the model bit-width settings before actual training due to the non-differential bit-width sampling process, obtaining sub-optimal performance. Worse still, the conventional static quality-consistent training setting, i.e., all data is assumed to be of the same quality across training and inference, overlooks data quality changes in real-world applications which may lead to poor robustness of the quantized models. In this paper, we propose a novel Data Quality-aware Mixed-precision Quantization framework, dubbed DQMQ, to dynamically adapt quantization bit-widths to different data qualities. The adaption is based on a bit-width decision policy that can be learned jointly with the quantization training. Concretely, DQMQ is modeled as a hybrid reinforcement learning (RL) task that combines model-based policy optimization with supervised quantization training. By relaxing the discrete bit-width sampling to a continuous probability distribution that is encoded with few learnable parameters, DQMQ is differentiable and can be directly optimized end-to-end with a hybrid optimization target considering both task performance and quantization benefits. Trained on mixed-quality image datasets, DQMQ can implicitly select the most proper bit-width for each layer when facing uneven input qualities. Extensive experiments on various benchmark datasets and networks demonstrate the superiority of DQMQ against existing fixed/mixed-precision quantization methods.

本研究提出了一种名为DQMQ的新型混合精度量化框架，可动态地适应不同数据质量，通过学习一个决策规则，它被建模为一种混合强化学习任务，该任务结合了基于模型的策略优化和监督量化训练。通过在混合质量的图像数据集上进行训练，DQMQ可以在面对不均匀输入质量时隐式地选择每个层的最适宜比特宽度，在各种基准数据集和网络上的大量实验表明，DQMQ比现有的固定/混合精度量化方法更为优越。

基于混合强化学习的数据质量感知混合精度量化