arXiv:2606. 20381v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: FP4 training promises substantial reductions in memory and computation cost for LLM pretraining, yet current FP4 hardware paths and recipes, including NVIDIA Blackwell/Rubin-class systems and AMD MI350-series GPUs, remain centered on E2M1 data elements.
arXiv:2601. 22813v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The NVFP4 lower-precision format, supported in hardware by NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, promises to allow, for the first time, end-to-end fully-quantized pre-training of massive models such as LLMs.
Stable 4-bit floating-point (FP4) pretraining is difficult because the E2M1 payload represents only a narrow range of magnitudes. NVIDIA's Transformer Engine \nv{} recipe addresses this with current-tensor scaling, a randomized Hadamard transform (RHT), and bfloat16 (BF16) final layers, adding work outside the FP4 matrix multiplications.
The paper introduces a new 4‑bit floating‑point (FP4) pretraining approach that pairs E2M1 payloads with unsigned E5M3 block scales, enabling periodic tensor scaling and selective stochastic rounding while eliminating the randomized Hadamard transform. Using this method, the authors pretrained a Nemotron‑H 8B model on nearly 190 billion tokens, achieving lower training and validation losses compared to NVIDIA’s Transformer Engine. The approach also improves inference performance and demonstrates a 21.2 % increase in token throughput when certain optimizations are removed.
arXiv:2605. 09825v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Why does full-pipeline FP4 training of large language models often diverge, even when forward activations and activation gradients remain stable?
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.
The paper introduces format‑aware fusion, a method that co‑designs quantization producers with their scale domains and consumer layouts to fully exploit four‑bit floating‑point (FP4) Tensor Cores. Using this approach, the authors pretrain the Llama‑3‑family 8B model on 160 billion tokens, achieving up to 37.9 K tokens/s/GPU—significantly higher than standard bfloat16 or Transformer Engine FP4 baselines. The study demonstrates that FP4 performance depends on the interplay of scaling, operand packing, layout, and execution path, with downstream task rankings diverging from training‑loss rankings.
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.
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.
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.
arXiv:2606. 08761v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: W4A4 quantization promises full utilization of INT4 Tensor Cores, yet group dequantization overhead on CUDA Cores has driven existing systems to mixed-precision fallbacks.
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.
arXiv:2601. 07475v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The emergence of fine-grained numerical formats like NVFP4 presents new opportunities for efficient Large Language Model (LLM) inference.