EVA: Accelerating LLM Decoding via an Efficient Vector Quantization Architecture
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance across diverse domains but remain inefficient during the autoregressive decoding phase. Unlike the prefill stage, which employs compute-bound GEMM operations, decoding executes a sequence of small GEMV-like computations that are memory-bound and underutilize modern accelerators. Weight-only vector quantization (VQ) has emerged as an effective compression technique that clusters model weights into a shared codebook and replaces the original weight matrix with low-precision indices, enabling 2-bit-level weight compression. While this approach substantially reduces model size and memory bandwidth, it still suffers from two critical inefficiencies: the low utilization of GEMV computation and frequent memory conflicts during codebook lookups. This paper presents EVA, an efficient vector-quantization-based architecture that addresses both computational and memory bottlenecks in LLM decoding. EVA builds on a simple yet effective insight that combines input-codebook computation with conflict-free memory access. Instead of reconstructing quantized weights from indices, EVA directly performs dot products between input vectors and the weight codebook, transforming LLM decoding from GEMV to GEMM computation. It then performs structured lookups from an intermediate output buffer, eliminating memory bank conflicts. We further design a hardware-software co-optimized architecture specialized for LLM decoding while remaining compatible with conventional prefill execution. Evaluations show that EVA achieves up to 11.17$\times$ speedup and 7.17$\times$ higher energy efficiency compared with the SOTA lookup-based architecture, while preserving arithmetic precision after vector quantization. Our code is available at https://github.com/dbw6/Eva.git.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
RQ-MoE: Residual Quantization via Mixture of Experts for Efficient Input-Dependent Vector Compression
Vector quantization is a fundamental tool for compressing high-dimensional embeddings, yet existing multi-codebook methods rely on static codebooks that limit expressiveness under heterogeneous data geometry. While recen…
Lightweight Road Environment Segmentation using Vector Quantization
Road environment segmentation plays a significant role in autonomous driving. Numerous works based on Fully Convolutional Networks (FCNs) and Transformer architectures have been proposed to leverage local and global cont…
Autonomous DrivingImage SegmentationQuantizationSegmentation+1Accelerating Large-Scale Inference with Anisotropic Vector Quantization
Quantization based techniques are the current state-of-the-art for scaling maximum inner product search to massive databases. Traditional approaches to quantization aim to minimize the reconstruction error of the databas…
BenchmarkingQuantizationAccelerating Deep Learning Model Inference on Arm CPUs with Ultra-Low Bit Quantization and Runtime
Deep Learning has been one of the most disruptive technological advancements in recent times. The high performance of deep learning models comes at the expense of high computational, storage and power requirements. Sensi…
QuantizationPyramid Vector Quantization for LLMs
Recent works on compression of large language models (LLM) using quantization considered reparameterizing the architecture such that weights are distributed on the sphere. This demonstratively improves the ability to qua…
Quantization