Vision Transformers (ViTs) have achieved remarkable performance in various image classification tasks by leveraging the attention mechanism to process image patches as tokens. However, the high computational and memory demands of ViTs pose significant challenges for deployment in resource-constrained environments. This paper introduces ViT-1.58b, a novel 1.58-bit quantized ViT model designed to drastically reduce memory and computational overhead while preserving competitive performance. ViT-1.58b employs ternary quantization, which refines the balance between efficiency and accuracy by constraining weights to {-1, 0, 1} and quantizing activations to 8-bit precision. Our approach ensures efficient scaling in terms of both memory and computation. Experiments on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet-1k demonstrate that ViT-1.58b maintains comparable accuracy to full-precision Vit, with significant reductions in memory usage and computational costs. This paper highlights the potential of extreme quantization techniques in developing sustainable AI solutions and contributes to the broader discourse on efficient model deployment in practical applications. Our code and weights are available at https://github.com/DLYuanGod/ViT-1.58b.

ViT-1.58b是一种新的1.58-bit量化的视觉Transformer模型，通过三值量化的方式来平衡效率和准确性，实现了在存储和计算开销方面的高效扩展。实验证明，ViT-1.58b与全精度ViT相比，在减少存储使用和计算成本方面取得了显著的成果，从而突出了极端量化技术在开发可持续的人工智能解决方案方面的潜力，并为实际应用中高效模型部署的广泛讨论做出了贡献。

ViT-1.58b：1-bit时代的移动视觉Transformer