arXiv AI June 26, 2026 By Haoqian Meng, Yilun Luo, Yafei Zhao, Wenyuan Liu, Huaqing Zheng, Xindian Ma, Peng Zhang

SharQ: Bridging Activation Sparsity and FP4 Quantization for LLM Inference

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.

Summary generated by The Flow from the publisher's feed. The full article lives at arXiv AI.

arXiv AI

Jul 7

ARCQuant: Boosting NVFP4 Quantization with Augmented Residual Channels for LLMs

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

llms efficiency benchmarks

arXiv AI

Jun 4

Recover-LoRA for Aggressive Quantization: Reclaiming Accuracy in 2-Bit Language Models via Low-Rank Adaptation with Knowledge Distillation on Synthetic Data

arXiv:2606. 04238v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Aggressive weight quantization to 2-bit precision offers substantial throughput and memory gains for large language model (LLM) inference, but typically incurs severe accuracy degradation.

By Devleena Das, Rajeev Patwari, Elliott Delaye, Ashish Sirasao

llms fine-tuning efficiency benchmarks

arXiv Machine Learning

Jul 30

HiFloat4 Format for End-To-End Reinforcement Learning Post-Training of Large Language Models

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

llms reinforcement-learning efficiency

arXiv AI

Jul 7

HiFA4: Training-Free 4-bit FlashAttention on Ascend HIF4 NPUs for LLM Inference

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

llms nlp efficiency benchmarks

arXiv Machine Learning

Jun 2

Quartet II: Accurate LLM Pre-Training in NVFP4 by Improved Unbiased Gradient Estimation

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

llms efficiency

arXiv Machine Learning

Jun 16

MosaicQuant: Inlier-Outlier Disaggregation for Unified 4-Bit LLM Quantization

arXiv:2606. 15652v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: 4-bit quantization significantly reduces the memory footprint and accelerates the inference of large language models (LLMs).

By Yangjia Hu, Haodong Wang, Zicong Hong, Qianli Liu, Quanxin Shou, Jian Lin, Song Guo, Xiaowei Shen, Xiangjun Huang, Dian Wang, Jian Yang

llms efficiency

Related stories

ARCQuant: Boosting NVFP4 Quantization with Augmented Residual Channels for LLMs

Recover-LoRA for Aggressive Quantization: Reclaiming Accuracy in 2-Bit Language Models via Low-Rank Adaptation with Knowledge Distillation on Synthetic Data

HiFloat4 Format for End-To-End Reinforcement Learning Post-Training of Large Language Models

HiFA4: Training-Free 4-bit FlashAttention on Ascend HIF4 NPUs for LLM Inference

Quartet II: Accurate LLM Pre-Training in NVFP4 by Improved Unbiased Gradient Estimation

MosaicQuant: Inlier-Outlier Disaggregation for Unified 4-Bit LLM Quantization