IMC-CLINIC: Coupled Loss-Informed Newton Iterations for Clipping in Analog In-Memory Computing· IMC-CLINIC:耦合损失告知的牛顿迭代剪裁
Analog in-memory computing (IMC) offers a promising path toward energy-efficient large language model (LLM) inference by executing matrix multiplications (MatMul) directly within memory arrays in the analog domain. Its efficiency, however, comes with an additional source of error: limited-precision analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) quantize accumulated analog partial sums, introducing output-side error distinct from conventional activation and weight quantization at the MatMul inputs. Clipping can mitigate both operand and ADC quantization errors, but the optimal clipping factors must jointly balance activation rounding and clipping, weight rounding and clipping, and ADC quantization. Existing clipping methods, designed for digital quantization, do not explicitly optimize these coupled s