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.
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.
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.
arXiv:2607. 09967v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many neural networks operations have a multiplicative nature rather than additive: halving or doubling a norm are analogous relatively but require unequal optimization distances when taking linear steps.
arXiv:2606. 00888v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dynamic Sparse Training (DST) offers a promising paradigm for improving the training and inference efficiency of deep neural networks; however, we find that in large language model training, DST can suffer from optimization instability, manifested as loss spikes after topology updates.