arXiv AI

HiFA4: Training-Free 4-bit FlashAttention on Ascend HIF4 NPUs for LLM Inference

arXiv:2607. 04302v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present HiFA4, a post-training operator-level design that executes both QK^T and PV in FlashAttention as 4-bit HIF4 Cube GEMMs for LLM inference on Ascend NPUs, while maintaining the online softmax state in FP16.

arXiv AI
Jun 26

SharQ: Bridging Activation Sparsity and FP4 Quantization for LLM Inference

arXiv:2606. 26587v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Low-bit floating-point formats and semi-structured sparsity are increasingly supported by modern accelerators, yet combining them for LLM activation compression remains challenging: activations contain input-dependent outliers that dominate block scales in FP4 quantization, and directly applying N:M sparsity masks discards moderate values, coupling sparsification loss with quantization error.

By Haoqian Meng, Yilun Luo, Yafei Zhao, Wenyuan Liu, Huaqing Zheng, Xindian Ma, Peng Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 30

HiFloat4 Format for End-To-End Reinforcement Learning Post-Training of Large Language Models

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.

By Hei Yi Mak, Shadan Golestan, Hoang Le, Mehran Taghian Jazi, Yunke Peng, Yaoyuan Wang, Yao Wang, Junsong Wang, Tianchi Hu, Fengchen He, Guipeng Hu, Tanzila Rahman, Anandharaju Durai Raju
arXiv AI
Aug 11

Attn-QAT: 4-Bit Attention With Quantization-Aware Training

arXiv:2603. 00040v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Achieving reliable 4-bit attention is a prerequisite for end-to-end FP4 computation on emerging FP4-capable GPUs, yet attention remains the main obstacle due to FP4's tiny dynamic range and attention's heavy-tailed activations.

By Peiyuan Zhang, Matthew Noto, Wenxuan Tan, Chengquan Jiang, Will Lin, Wei Zhou, Hao Zhang
arXiv AI
Jun 15

The Curse and Blessing of Mean Bias in FP4-Quantized LLM Training

arXiv:2603. 10444v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: FP4 training promises substantial memory and compute savings for large language models, but remains fragile because blockwise quantization is dictated by extreme activation magnitudes, which inflate dynamic range and compress long-tail signals.

By Hengjie Cao, Zhendong Huang, Mengyi Chen, Yifeng Yang, Fang Dong, Anrui Chen, Ruijun Huang, Xin Zhang, Mingzhi Dong, Yujiang Wang, Jinlong Hou, Qin Lv, Robert P. Dick, Yuan Cheng, Tun Lu, Fan Yang, Yixuan Chen, Li Shang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 20

QUADS: Stabilizing NVFP4 Reinforcement Learning for MoE via QUantization-error Alignment across Dual Sides

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.

By Zhengyang Zhuge, Hao Yu, Xin Wang, Zheng Li, Yizhong Cao, Dayiheng Liu, Jianwei Zhang
arXiv AI
Jul 29

How Small Can You Go? A Controlled Study of LoRA Rank, Target Modules, and Quantization Trade-offs for Text-to-SQL on a 60M-Parameter Model

arXiv:2607. 25583v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) and low-bit quantization are now standard tools for adapting language models under tight compute budgets, yet their interaction is most often studied on billion-parameter models where the design space is expensive to explore.

By Mahendra Singh Rathor, Anagheem Azzam