Thinking in Granularity: Dynamic Quantization for Image Super-Resolution by Intriguing Multi-Granularity Clues

Dynamic quantization has attracted rising attention in image super-resolution (SR) as it expands the potential of heavy SR models onto mobile devices while preserving competitive performance. Most current methods explore layer-to-bit configuration upon varying local regions, adaptively allocating the bit to each layer and patch. Despite the benefits, they still fall short in the tradeoff of SR accuracy and quantization efficiency. Apart from this, adapting the quantization level for each layer individually can disturb the original inter-layer relationships, thus diminishing the representation capability of quantized models. In this work, we propose Granular-DQ, which takes advantage of multi-granularity clues and local patch statistics, achieving a distinctive patch-wise and layer-invariant dynamic quantization paradigm. Specifically, Granular-DQ initiates by developing a granularity-bit controller to apprehend the coarse-to-fine granular representations of local patches, matching their proportional contribution to the entire image to determine the proper bit-width allocation. On this premise, we investigate the interrelationships between bit-width and information density within high-bit patches, establishing a soft gate that enables further fine-grained dynamic bit adaption. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of Granular-DQ in the trade-off between efficiency and accuracy over recent state-of-the-art methods on various SR models.