arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 16

Is INT8 Portable? A Cross-Platform Measurement Study of Quantized Inference on Embedded and Automotive Accelerators

The study evaluates the portability of INT8 post‑training quantization across seven hardware platforms, including CPUs, GPUs, and vendor NPUs, by keeping the ONNX model and quantization scales constant. It finds that INT8 performance and output consistency vary significantly: CPU dot‑product instructions determine speedup, identical INT8 outputs only occur when integer kernels match, and vendor NPUs require their own quantization pipelines. The authors also show that edge‑NPU latency is dominated by data transfer rather than compute and provide scripts and reports for reproducibility.

By Yuyeong Shin
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 2

QATFactory: A Versatile, Deployment-Aligned Framework for Quantization-aware Training and Distillation of LLMs

arXiv:2609.39223v2 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) inference is increasingly moving toward lower precision to realize the throughput of hardware accelerators, but aggressive p...

By Weili Xu, Jisen Li, Yuqing Jian, Chenxi Li, Zhizhou Sha, Yifan Yu, Qingyang Wu, Chenfeng Xu, Zhongzhu Zhou, Tianyi Zhang, Ben Athiwaratkun
arXiv AI
Sep 7

Golden Ruler: A Numeric Format Catalog with Bit-Exact Conformance Vectors for FP8, BF16, MXFP4, and Microscaling Formats

The paper introduces the Golden Ruler, a catalog of 109 numeric formats for machine learning hardware, including FP8, BF16, MXFP4, and microscaling block formats. It provides six bit‑exact conformance packs that map to IEEE P3109 v3.2.0 standards, each as a self‑contained JSON document with a SHA‑256 fingerprint and an anchor vector for cross‑pack sanity checks. The work cross‑validates these packs against ml_dtypes 0.5.4 and documents any divergences as spec‑permitted gaps, offering a vendor‑neutral reference for engineers.

By Dmitrii Vasilev