We sincerely thank four reviewers for the valuable comments. The ablation study issue is concerned by Reviewer #2, #4. We answer these issues first. We have already conducted the ablation study on the temperature in Sec. We fill fix the typos in the updated version and proofread the paper to make it more readible.

As neural networks have become more powerful, there has been a rising desire to deploy them in the real world; however, the power and accuracy of neural networks is largely due to their depth and complexity, making them difficult to deploy, especially in resource-constrained devices. Neural network quantization has recently arisen to meet this demand of reducing the size and complexity of neural networks by reducing the precision of a network. With smaller and simpler networks, it becomes possible to run neural networks within the constraints of their target hardware. This paper surveys the many neural network quantization techniques that have been developed in the last decade. Based on this survey and comparison of neural network quantization techniques, we propose future directions of research in the area.

We present extensions to the Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX) intermediate representation format to represent arbitrary-precision quantized neural networks. We first introduce support for low precision quantization in existing ONNX-based quantization formats by leveraging integer clipping, resulting in two new backward-compatible variants: the quantized operator format with clipping and quantize-clip-dequantize (QCDQ) format. We then introduce a novel higher-level ONNX format called quantized ONNX (QONNX) that introduces three new operators -- Quant, BipolarQuant, and Trunc -- in order to represent uniform quantization. By keeping the QONNX IR high-level and flexible, we enable targeting a wider variety of platforms. We also present utilities for working with QONNX, as well as examples of its usage in the FINN and hls4ml toolchains. Finally, we introduce the QONNX model zoo to share low-precision quantized neural networks.

Real-world applications of Deep Neural Networks are increasing by the day as we are learning to make use of Artificial Intelligence to accomplish various simple and complex tasks. However, the problem with Deep Neural Networks is that they involve too many parameters due to which they require powerful computation devices and large memory storage. This makes it almost impossible to run on devices with lower computation power such as Android and other low-power edge devices. Optimization techniques such as Quantization can be utilized to solve this problem. With the help of different quantization techniques, we can reduce the precision of our parameters from float to lower precision such as int8, resulting in efficient computation and less amount of storage.

In this paper, we present a novel approach for fine-tuning a decoder-side neural network in the context of image compression, such that the weight-updates are better compressible. At encoder side, we fine-tune a pre-trained artifact removal network on target data by using a compression objective applied on the weight-update. In particular, the compression objective encourages weight-updates which are sparse and closer to quantized values. This way, the final weight-update can be compressed more efficiently by pruning and quantization, and can be included into the encoded bitstream together with the image bitstream of a traditional codec. We show that this approach achieves reconstruction quality which is on-par or slightly superior to a traditional codec, at comparable bitrates. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to combine image compression and neural network's weight update compression.