arXiv:2606. 14598v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-training INT8 (W8A8) quantization of diffusion transformers is widely deployed as a speed optimization, yet on consumer Ampere GPUs it is frequently slower than the FP8 and NF4 alternatives it is meant to beat.
By Ali Asaria, Tony Salomone, Deep Gandhi
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:2607. 02893v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Low-bit quantization shrinks language models but treats precision as a single global hyper-parameter: every weight uses the same bit-width.
By Hamish Ogilvy
arXiv:2607. 21446v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-training quantization (PTQ) of diffusion transformers (DiTs) to W4A4 severely degrades output quality, because activations entering each linear layer contain outliers that 4-bit formats cannot represent.
By Yann Bouquet, Alireza Khodamoradi, Kristof Denolf, Mathieu Salzmann
arXiv:2607. 14568v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A companion study ran a 35B mixture-of-experts model on a 2011 NVIDIA Tesla C2075 (Fermi, sm_20, 6GB) as a GPU-prefill/CPU-decode hybrid, because the 4-bit model did not fit in device memory (arXiv:2606.
By A. C. Opus, J. Q. Lu
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.
By Hui Dong, Yanzhao Li, Jie Gao, Chunlu Li, Zhiyuan Zhang, Yupeng Sun, Zhenyuan Chen, Zhiqiang Zou
arXiv:2608. 13756v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Two GPU kernels implementing the same scaled INT8 GEMM interface are usually treated as interchangeable.
By Teng-Ruei Chen
arXiv:2608. 12026v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-training quantization pipelines routinely leave the softmax output layer in high precision.
By Joao V. Cavalcanti, Ashia C. Wilson
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:2606. 06521v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: FP8 (E4M3) acceleration for attention computation offers significant throughput gains, but the 3-bit mantissa introduces precision challenges when the softmax probability matrix P is cast to FP8 before the P*V matrix multiplication.
By Reed Lau
arXiv:2602. 16086v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent collapse-free quantizers such as FSQ achieve stable training by replacing the learnable codebook with an engineered geometry: a fixed scalar grid whose structure is dictated by the codebook size K.
By Idil Bilge Altun, Mert Onur Cakiroglu, Elham Buxton, Mehmet Dalkilic, Hasan Kurban
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