Mix-QViT: Mixed-Precision Vision Transformer Quantization Driven by Layer Importance and Quantization Sensitivity
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Abstract (arXiv)
In this paper, we propose Mix-QViT, an explainability-driven MPQ framework that systematically allocates bit-widths to each layer based on two criteria: layer importance, assessed via Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP), which identifies how much each layer contributes to the final classification, and quantization sensitivity, determined by evaluating the performance impact of quantizing each layer at various precision levels while keeping others layers at a baseline. Additionally, for post-training quantization (PTQ), we introduce a clipped channel-wise quantization method designed to reduce the effects of extreme outliers in post-LayerNorm activations by removing severe inter-channel variations. We validate our approach by applying Mix-QViT to ViT, DeiT, and Swin Transformer models across multiple datasets. Our experimental results for PTQ demonstrate that both fixed-bit and mixed-bit methods outperform existing techniques, particularly at 3-bit, 4-bit, and 6-bit precision. Furthermore, in quantization-aware training, Mix-QViT achieves superior performance with 2-bit mixed-precision.
Key facts. Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 49 of its 52 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 10 Jan 2025.
Builds on
49 of 52 references.
References · 49
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37 more
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2025: 4; 2026: 5.
9 papers.
- 2026Locate, Steer, and Improve: A Practical Survey of Actionable Mechanistic Interpretability in Large Language Modelscited by 22
- 2025Mix-QSAM: Mixed-Precision Quantization of the Segment Anything Modelcited by 4
- 2025MSQ: Memory-Efficient Bit Sparsification Quantizationcited by 2
- 2026Quantizing Time-Series Models As Dynamical Systems: Trajectory-Based Quantization Sensitivity Scorecited by 2
- 2025Exploiting Information Redundancy in Attention Maps for Extreme Quantization of Vision Transformerscited by 1
- 2025I-Segmenter: Integer-Only Vision Transformer for Efficient Semantic Segmentationcited by 1
- 2026SFMP: Fine-Grained, Hardware-Friendly and Search-Free Mixed-Precision Quantization for Large Language Modelscited by 1
- 2026MixFrag: Fragility-Guided Mixed-Precision Post-Training Quantization for Vision Transformerscited by 0
- 2026Teacher-Anchored Selection of Post-Training Quantized Models under Domain Shiftcited by 0
- 2026Teacher-Anchored Selection of Post-Training Quantized Models under Domain Shift25 Sep 2026
- 2026MixFrag: Fragility-Guided Mixed-Precision Post-Training Quantization for Vision Transformers30 Jul 2026
- 2026Quantizing Time-Series Models As Dynamical Systems: Trajectory-Based Quantization Sensitivity Score11 Jun 2026
- 2026SFMP: Fine-Grained, Hardware-Friendly and Search-Free Mixed-Precision Quantization for Large Language Models1 Feb 2026
- 2026Locate, Steer, and Improve: A Practical Survey of Actionable Mechanistic Interpretability in Large Language Models20 Jan 2026
- 2025I-Segmenter: Integer-Only Vision Transformer for Efficient Semantic Segmentation12 Sep 2025
- 2025Exploiting Information Redundancy in Attention Maps for Extreme Quantization of Vision Transformers22 Aug 2025
- 2025MSQ: Memory-Efficient Bit Sparsification Quantization30 Jul 2025
- 2025Mix-QSAM: Mixed-Precision Quantization of the Segment Anything Model8 May 2025