DualQuant introduces a dual‑scale, calibration‑free post‑training quantization framework that jointly optimizes weight‑reconstruction MSE and derives per‑channel activation rescalings, enabling effective 4‑bit weight and activation quantization without calibration data. The method employs a non‑differentiable optimization solved via variable splitting and block coordinate descent, supporting a wide range of formats including MX and NVFP4. Experiments on Llama and Qwen models show DualQuant matches or surpasses calibration‑based SmoothQuant and significantly outperforms other calibration‑free baselines, achieving up to 2.61× memory reduction and 2.46× throughput speedup on an RTX 4090.
By Mahsa Salmani, Sayeh Sharify, Hesham Mostafa
arXiv:2606. 07618v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: NVFP4 is a recently introduced hardware-supported FP4 format that improves the fidelity of 4-bit quantization through fine-grained block scales.
By Li Lin, Xiaojun Wan
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.
By Robert Hu, Carlo Luschi, Paul Balanca
The paper introduces MiX, a micro‑inverted‑scaling format that replaces shared exponents with shared mantissas to avoid microscaling collapse in low‑bit vision‑language models. An adaptive dual‑format inference framework (MiX‑MX) maps this format to a custom accelerator, replacing multipliers with shifters. Experiments show 4.5‑bit MiX matches or outperforms NVFP4 accuracy while improving area efficiency by 25 % and delivering 2.3–4.5× speedup with 1.4–2.9× energy savings over the Focus accelerator.
By Yuan Liao, Jae-sun Seo
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.
By Andrei Panferov, Erik Schultheis, Soroush Tabesh, Dan Alistarh
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.
arXiv:2605. 08692v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Post-training weight-only quantization to 4 bits is widely used to reduce the memory and compute costs of large language model inference.
By Beshr IslamBouli, David Jin
arXiv:2609.36654v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models make weight storage and memory traffic major inference costs, motivating low-precision formats that represent each weight with on...
By Ruiyi Ding, Jie Li, Kang He, Ziyan Liu, Chengru Song, Yuedong Xu, Yuan Cheng
arXiv:2609.00066v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: NVFP4 is an efficient microscaling format for low-bit inference, but activation outliers can still degrade quantization accuracy within NVFP4 blocks....
By Yishan Yao, Binjun Li, Hanling Yi, Pengyu Li, Xiaoqing Liu, Zihan Yang, Xiaotian Yu, Zhiwen Yu
MiX: Micro-Inverted-Scaling for End-to-End Low-Bit Vision-Language Model Acceleration proposes a new quantization format that inverts the traditional microscaling approach by assigning private exponents to each element and a shared mantissa. The adaptive dual-format MiX-MX inference framework maps this format to a custom accelerator, replacing multipliers with shifters. Evaluations show that 4.5-bit MiX matches or surpasses NVFP4 accuracy on multimodal benchmarks while improving area efficiency by 25% and delivering 2.3–4.5× speedup with 1.4–2.9× energy reduction compared to the Focus accelerator.
The paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of post‑training quantization (PTQ) techniques for large language models (LLMs), addressing gaps in prior work by conducting fair, large‑scale experiments on text‑only LLMs. It decouples quantization into pre‑quantization transformation and error mitigation, systematically studies granularity, symmetry, and data formats (MXFP4, NVFP4), and finds that rotation‑based transformations and low‑rank compensation with GPTQ can improve performance, while finer granularity and asymmetric quantization benefit activations more than weights. The study highlights the importance of understanding component interactions and the impact of scaling factor formats on low‑bit quantization performance.
By Yutong Liu, Cairong Zhao, Guosheng Hu
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.
By Haoqian Meng, Yilun Luo, Yafei Zhao, Wenyuan Liu, Peng Zhang, Xindian Ma