QUARK: Quantization-Enabled Circuit Sharing for Transformer Acceleration by Exploiting Common Patterns in Nonlinear Operations

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2511.06767v1
• Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2025 06:46:21 GMT
• Title: QUARK: Quantization-Enabled Circuit Sharing for Transformer Acceleration by Exploiting Common Patterns in Nonlinear Operations
• Authors: Zhixiong Zhao, Haomin Li, Fangxin Liu, Yuncheng Lu, Zongwu Wang, Tao Yang, Li Jiang, Haibing Guan,
• Abstract summary: QUARK is a quantization-enabled FPGA acceleration framework.<n>It targets all nonlinear operations within Transformer-based models.<n>It achieves high-performance approximation through a novel circuit-sharing design.
• Score: 16.476647190730876
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Transformer-based models have revolutionized computer vision (CV) and natural language processing (NLP) by achieving state-of-the-art performance across a range of benchmarks. However, nonlinear operations in models significantly contribute to inference latency, presenting unique challenges for efficient hardware acceleration. To this end, we propose QUARK, a quantization-enabled FPGA acceleration framework that leverages common patterns in nonlinear operations to enable efficient circuit sharing, thereby reducing hardware resource requirements. QUARK targets all nonlinear operations within Transformer-based models, achieving high-performance approximation through a novel circuit-sharing design tailored to accelerate these operations. Our evaluation demonstrates that QUARK significantly reduces the computational overhead of nonlinear operators in mainstream Transformer architectures, achieving up to a 1.96 times end-to-end speedup over GPU implementations. Moreover, QUARK lowers the hardware overhead of nonlinear modules by more than 50% compared to prior approaches, all while maintaining high model accuracy -- and even substantially boosting accuracy under ultra-low-bit quantization.

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