Low-Precision Training of Large Language Models: Methods, Challenges, and Opportunities
arXiv:2505. 01043v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance across various domains.
arXiv:2607. 10611v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training with quantized weights can reduce costs but often results in degraded accuracy, especially when optimization is carried out in low precision, without storing high-precision copies.
arXiv:2505. 01043v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance across various domains.
arXiv:2606. 17526v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient optimization is essential for training large language models.
Squeeze10-LLM is a staged mixed‑precision post‑training quantization framework that reduces 16‑bit LLM weights to an average of 1.6 bits per weight by assigning 80% of weights to 1 bit and 20% to 4 bits. It introduces Post‑Binarization Activation Robustness (PBAR), a weight significance metric that considers activation impact, and Full Information Activation Supervision (FIAS), a strategy that preserves activation information to limit error propagation. Experiments on LLaMA and LLaMA2 demonstrate that Squeeze10‑LLM achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance for sub‑2‑bit weight‑only quantization, raising average accuracy from 43% to 56% on six zero‑shot classification tasks.
arXiv:2606. 13894v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AdamW is a default optimizer for modern deep learning, but its first and second moment states add roughly two parameter-sized buffers to training memory.
arXiv:2608. 06177v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Binary neural networks are very attractive for constrained deployment, enabling small footprint and low-power inference.
arXiv:2608. 01997v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Single-optimizer training is a poor fit for the distinct phases of deep network optimization: adaptive methods handle noisy early gradients well but overshoot flat minima, while SGD with momentum generalizes better in the late phase but converges slowly early on.
arXiv:2606. 00539v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training stability is a key bottleneck in low-precision language model training: efficient low-cost paths can still produce short-lived numerical risks at a small set of operators.
arXiv:2502. 11034v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Loss spikes remain a persistent obstacle in large-scale language model pretraining.
arXiv:2605. 24391v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As the demand for deep learning grows, cost reduction through quantization has become essential for both training and inference.
arXiv:2502. 17055v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Training instability in modern deep learning systems is frequently triggered by rare but extreme gradient-norm spikes, which can induce oversized parameter updates, corrupt optimizer state, and lead to slow recovery or divergence.
The paper introduces Adaptive Log‑Space (AL) quantization, a block‑wise representation that adapts the non‑zero range per block and preserves the exact‑zero invariant for non‑negative optimizer states. AL8 and AL16 are combined with signed‑momentum encodings and state‑specific precision choices, rather than a single policy for all states. Experiments on TinyLlama‑1.1B and GPT‑2 show that AL‑based quantization can match or exceed full‑precision performance while dramatically reducing optimizer‑state storage.
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.