README.md

Low-Precision Quantizer

lpq(Low-Precision Quantizer) is a method for performing integer quantization. It is implemented in C++ with complete Python bindings. In order for the Python wheel to work, make sure you have python 3.7 and above installed.

Building the Package

In order to build this package, first clone this repository with the available submodules

$ git clone https://github.com/BlaiseMuhirwa/low_precision_quantization.git --recurse-submodules

Open the low_precision_quantization folder and install the necessary Python libraries via pip. I recommend first creating a virtual environment.

$ python3 -m venv lpq_venv
$ source lpq_venv/bin/activate
$(lpq_venv) pip install -r requirements.txt 

Now to build the package, run the setup file, which will invoke cmake in order to create a wheel file for the package.

$(lpq_venv) python setup.py bdist_wheel 

This will create a wheel file in a dist folder. The file should be named something like dist/lpq-0.0.1-cp310-cp310-macosx_12_0_arm64.whl. The final step is to just install the library with pip.

$(lpq_venv) pip install dist/dist/lpq-0.0.1-cp310-cp310-macosx_12_0_arm64.whl

You can then import this library in a python script as follows:

from lpq import quantizer

quantizer = quantizer.LowPrecisionQuantizerInt8()
help(quantizer)