GausiQ: Generalized Automatic Hybrid-Precision Quantization for MIMO Detection

Abstract

Automatic quantization generates efficient hybrid precision quantization schemes without manual effort, offering a promising approach for developing hardware-friendly MIMO detectors. However, unified quantization (UQ) and existing automatic quantization methods typically optimize the integral part (IP) and fractional part (FP) bitwidths separately, resulting in considerable bitwidth redundancy. To address it, we propose a generalized automatic hybrid-precision quantization (GausiQ) algorithm, employing two key techniques: 1) joint optimization of the IP and FP bitwidths based on DRL, and 2) reduction of the inter-variable interference through terminal state. The proposed GausiQ has been evaluated in a $16\times 32~16$ -QAM MIMO system, utilizing MMSE detection as a case study. Numerical results demonstrate that the incorporation of terminal state can significantly accelerate the convergence rate. Compared to UQ and the state-of-the-art, GausiQ has reduced the average bitwidth by 29.67% and 12.33% without penalizing BER performance.