arXiv AI

MXAttention: Data-Free Optimal Scaling and Pre-Normalization Quantization for MXFP4 Attention

arXiv:2607. 24377v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The quadratic cost of attention is a major bottleneck in diffusion-based video generation models.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 21

EFQ-Softmax: Exp-Free Quantization for Softmax

EFQ-Softmax is a low‑bit probability‑generation technique that replaces the traditional exp‑then‑quantize path in Transformer attention. It maps shifted attention scores directly to block‑scaled E2M1 operands using an exponent‑only scale and a single affine rule, allowing the same low‑bit representation to be used for both numerator and denominator updates. Experiments on Qwen3‑8B, Qwen3‑VL‑8B‑Instruct, and WAN2.2‑TI2V‑5B show that EFQ‑Softmax maintains or improves model quality while reducing vector‑stage latency by about 40% on the A5 vector unit.

By Haohui Han (Xi'an Jiaotong University), Yuming Wan (Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd), Hongni Wang (Shandong University of Finance and Economics), Pengcheng Xie (Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd), Xiaodong Yan (Xi'an Jiaotong University), Runqi You (Xi'an Jiaotong University), Wencong Zhang (Xi'an Jiaotong University)
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28

Activation Outliers Matter: Robust Recovery for Quantized Multimodal LLMs

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.

By Tanzila Rahman, Mehran Taghian Jazi, Yunke Peng, Zhuang Ma, Anandharaju Durai Raju, Yao Wang, Xing Huang, Hei Yi Mak, Shadan Golestan, Hoang Le, Yonghan Dong, Wei Guo, Yaoyuan Wang
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

H-Scale: Hessian-Guided Scale Refinement for NVFP4 Sub-Byte LLM Inference

The paper introduces H-Scale, a lightweight post-processing technique for refining per-group scaling factors in NVFP4 quantized large language models. By using a diagonal second-order proxy from calibration activations, H-Scale selects hardware-valid scales that directly target layer output perturbation rather than just weight reconstruction error. Experiments on mainstream LLMs show that H-Scale improves NVFP4 baselines and brings several variants closer to BF16 performance without adding inference overhead.

By Hao Yu, Zheng Li, Dayiheng Liu, Jianwei Zhang
arXiv AI
Jul 29

Stable FP4 Training via Transposition-Invariant Block Quantization

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.

By Mehdi Rahimifar, Amin Darabi, Mehran Taghian Jazi, Xing Huang, Yao Wang, Zhijun Tu, Yufei Cui, Yunke Peng, Hongliang Li
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 4

DSAQuant: Denoising-Stage-Aligned Quantization-Aware Training for Video Generation

The paper introduces DSAQuant, a quantization‑aware training framework tailored for video diffusion models (VDMs). It aligns quantization with the denoising stages of VDMs, using denoising‑stage‑oriented supervision during training and denoising‑stage gated guidance during inference to preserve structure while improving detail reconstruction. Experiments on Wan and CogVideoX models under aggressive W3A3 and W4A4 quantization settings show that DSAQuant outperforms state‑of‑the‑art QAT baselines, boosting VBench scores by up to 6.60 while maintaining strong text‑video alignment.

By Shuaiting Li, Zelin Gao, Haibin Shen, Yujun Shen, Haotong Qin, Yinghao Xu