Hello, everyone.
I have a question on how to use prepare_qat properly.
I’m interested in quantizing a subset of models and like to apply prepare_qat selectively. However, a simple test code below reveals that such a selective case will not lead to the same quant-prep as the case where it is done at the top-level.

class LeNet(nn.Module):
def __init__(self):
    super().__init__()
    self.l1 = nn.Linear(28 * 28, 10)    
    self.relu1 = nn.ReLU(inplace=True)

def forward(self, x):             
    return self.relu1(self.l1(x.view(x.size(0), -1)))  

model_a = LeNet()
model_b = LeNet()
qconfig = torch.quantization.get_default_qat_qconfig()

Now, when comparing two ways of apply prepare_qat

top-level prepare_qat


model_a.qconfig = qconfig
torch.quantization.prepare_qat(model_a, inplace=True)
print(model_a)


layer-wise prepare_qat


model_b.l1.qconfig = qconfig
torch.quantization.prepare_qat(model_b.l1, inplace=True)
model_b.relu1.qconfig = qconfig
torch.quantization.prepare_qat(model_b.relu1, inplace=True)
print(model_b)

You can see below that print(model_a) and print(model_b) will yield different results, notably, weight_fake_quant is missing in model_b.l1. Can someone explain why these two have different behaviors and the right way to do selective quantization?
image2486×2022 527 KB