arXiv:2605. 20402v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: MXFP4 arithmetic can dramatically accelerate reinforcement learning (RL) post-training of large language models (LLMs), yet the quantization error introduces severe accuracy degradation.
arXiv:2607. 15810v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Rollout generation is a major bottleneck in Reinforcement Learning (RL) for Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) Large Language Models, motivating low-precision rollout acceleration such as FP8.
The paper introduces Calibrated Clipping, a dynamic method to align FP8 quantization bounds with high‑precision BF16 distributions, thereby mitigating training instability in full‑pipeline FP8 reinforcement learning for large language models. It identifies that compounded FP8 noise distorts importance ratios, causing entropy surges and garbled outputs. Experiments across GRPO and DAPO algorithms on 8B‑32B models show the technique restores performance to BF16 levels.
arXiv:2607. 26515v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present, to our knowledge, the first end-to-end FP4 RL post-training, in which both the rollout and training policies, including their forward and backward passes, operate at 4-bit precision.
arXiv:2608.20873v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Every way of teaching a deployed language model something new -- full fine-tuning, adapter merging, model editing -- replaces the released checkpoint,...
arXiv:2607. 24062v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) training for Large Language Models (LLMs) often suffers from instability due to the discrepancy between training and inference.
REAL-Q introduces a new post‑training quantization approach for large language models that replaces the traditional single closed‑form second‑order solver with a fine‑grained, dynamic block‑wise gradient descent applied after every 128‑column block. By aligning the surrogate loss with the end‑to‑end objective and using a sliding window for smooth cross‑layer transitions, REAL‑Q mitigates error propagation and information misalignment. Experiments on LLaMA‑3.1 and Qwen3 show up to ~49% reduction in end‑to‑end KL divergence compared to state‑of‑the‑art methods.
arXiv:2608. 08188v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-training quantization reduces the deployment cost of large language models, yet how severely a quantized model degrades is not determined by bit-width alone.
arXiv:2606. 09012v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Post-training quantization (PTQ) converts a trained full-precision model into low-bit weights without task-level retraining, while quantization-aware training (QAT) incorporates quantization into the training loop.
arXiv:2607. 24953v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reducing training precision is a key lever for improving the e ciency of large language model (LLM) training, but pushing beyond FP8 to 4-bit oating point (FP4) remains challenging due to instability during optimization.
The paper investigates low‑bit quantization for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), showing that MXFP8 retains near‑lossless performance while 4‑bit formats like MXFP4 and HiF4 cause significant degradation. It identifies activation quantization as the main source of this loss and introduces Residual Fallback Quantization (RFQ), a lightweight framework that adds a quantized residual pathway to improve activation fidelity without architectural changes. Experiments on Wan2.2 and Qwen3‑VL demonstrate that RFQ recovers much of the performance gap to BF16 baselines across generation and reasoning tasks.
The paper investigates where post‑training quantization (PTQ) harms large language models (LLMs) and how to best allocate a limited precision budget. By causally raising each layer to 8‑bit precision across nine open‑weight models, the authors find that quantization damage is diffuse rather than concentrated in specific task circuits or weight statistics, and that globally refining quantization granularity outperforms selectively protecting the most recoverable layers. They also observe that the residual accuracy loss is budget‑limited and that peak recovery locations correlate with architecture within families but not across families.
arXiv:2512. 18934v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Catastrophic forgetting poses a fundamental challenge in continual learning, particularly when models are quantized for deployment efficiency.