Towards Efficient and Accurate Winograd Convolution via Full Quantization

The Winograd algorithm is an efficient convolution implementation, which performs calculations in the transformed domain. To further improve the computation efficiency, recent works propose to combine it with model quantization. Although Post-Training Quantization has the advantage of low computational cost and has been successfully applied in many other scenarios, a severe accuracy drop exists when utilizing it in Winograd convolution. Besides, despite the Winograd algorithm consisting of four stages, most existing methods only quantize the element-wise multiplication stage, leaving a considerable portion of calculations in full precision. In this paper, observing the inconsistency among different transformation procedures, we present PTQ-Aware Winograd (PAW) to optimize them collaboratively under a unified objective function. Moreover, we explore the full quantization of faster Winograd (tile size ≥ 4 ) for the first time. We further propose a hardware-friendly method called Factorized Scale Quantization (FSQ), which can effectively balance the significant range differences in the Winograd domain. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, e.g., with 8-bit quantization and a tile size of 6, our method outperforms the previous Winograd PTQ method by 8.27% and 5.38% in terms of the top-1 accuracy on ResNet-18 and ResNet-34, respectively.