Scalar Quantization as Sparse Least Square Optimization.

Quantization aims to form new vectors or matrices with shared values close to the original. In recent years, the popularity of scalar quantization has been soaring as it is found huge utilities in reducing the resource cost of neural networks. Popular clustering-based techniques suffers substantially from the problems of dependency on the seed, empty or out-of-the-range clusters, and high time complexity. To overcome the problems, in this paper, scalar quantization is examined from a new perspective, namely sparse least square optimization. Specifically, several quantization algorithms based on l