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Low-precision neural network training has emerged as a promising direction for reducing computational costs and democratizing access to deep learning research. However, existing 4-bit quantization methods either rely on expensive GPU…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Shivnath Tathe

Transformer-based architectures have become the de-facto standard models for a wide range of Natural Language Processing tasks. However, their memory footprint and high latency are prohibitive for efficient deployment and inference on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-28 Yelysei Bondarenko , Markus Nagel , Tijmen Blankevoort

Recent work has shown potential in using Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) solvers to optimize certain aspects of neural networks (NNs). However the intriguing approach of training NNs with MIP solvers is under-explored.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-03 Tómas Thorbjarnarson , Neil Yorke-Smith

Network quantization generally converts full-precision weights and/or activations into low-bit fixed-point values in order to accelerate an inference process. Recent approaches to network quantization further discretize the gradients into…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-07-18 Dohyung Kim , Junghyup Lee , Jeimin Jeon , Jaehyeon Moon , Bumsub Ham

For most deep learning algorithms training is notoriously time consuming. Since most of the computation in training neural networks is typically spent on floating point multiplications, we investigate an approach to training that eliminates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-02-29 Zhouhan Lin , Matthieu Courbariaux , Roland Memisevic , Yoshua Bengio

Large language models (LLMs) have become pivotal in artificial intelligence, demonstrating strong capabilities in reasoning, understanding, and generating data. However, their deployment on edge devices is hindered by their substantial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Lucas Maisonnave , Cyril Moineau , Olivier Bichler , Fabrice Rastello

Deep networks run with low precision operations at inference time offer power and space advantages over high precision alternatives, but need to overcome the challenge of maintaining high accuracy as precision decreases. Here, we present a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-08 Steven K. Esser , Jeffrey L. McKinstry , Deepika Bablani , Rathinakumar Appuswamy , Dharmendra S. Modha

The growing computational demands of training large language models (LLMs) necessitate more efficient methods. Quantized training presents a promising solution by enabling low-bit arithmetic operations to reduce these costs. While FP8…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Ruizhe Wang , Yeyun Gong , Xiao Liu , Guoshuai Zhao , Ziyue Yang , Baining Guo , Zhengjun Zha , Peng Cheng

Lately, post-training quantization methods have gained considerable attention, as they are simple to use, and require only a small unlabeled calibration set. This small dataset cannot be used to fine-tune the model without significant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-15 Itay Hubara , Yury Nahshan , Yair Hanani , Ron Banner , Daniel Soudry

While integer arithmetic has been widely adopted for improved performance in deep quantized neural network inference, training remains a task primarily executed using floating point arithmetic. This is because both high dynamic range and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-02-14 Maolin Wang , Seyedramin Rasoulinezhad , Philip H. W. Leong , Hayden K. H. So

Diffusion models have demonstrated significant applications in the field of image generation. However, their high computational and memory costs pose challenges for deployment. Model quantization has emerged as a promising solution to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-17 Shizhuo Mao , Hongtao Zou , Qihu Xie , Song Chen , Yi Kang

Large language models have been widely adopted but require significant GPU memory for inference. We develop a procedure for Int8 matrix multiplication for feed-forward and attention projection layers in transformers, which cut the memory…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-11 Tim Dettmers , Mike Lewis , Younes Belkada , Luke Zettlemoyer

Powerful generative artificial intelligence from large language models (LLMs) harnesses extensive computational resources for inference. In this work, we investigate the transformer architecture, a key component of these models, under the…

Transformer architectures dominate modern NLP but often demand heavy computational resources and intricate hyperparameter tuning. To mitigate these challenges, we propose a novel framework, BoostTransformer, that augments transformers with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Biyi Fang , Truong Vo , Jean Utke , Diego Klabjan

This paper tackles the problem of training a deep convolutional neural network of both low-bitwidth weights and activations. Optimizing a low-precision network is very challenging due to the non-differentiability of the quantizer, which may…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-06-07 Bohan Zhuang , Jing Liu , Mingkui Tan , Lingqiao Liu , Ian Reid , Chunhua Shen

In this work, we propose a new training method for finding minimum weight norm solutions in over-parameterized neural networks (NNs). This method seeks to improve training speed and generalization performance by framing NN training as a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-06-22 Yamini Bansal , Madhu Advani , David D Cox , Andrew M Saxe

Recently, pre-trained Transformer based language models, such as BERT, have shown great superiority over the traditional methods in many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, the computational cost for deploying these models is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-28 Hanlin Tang , Xipeng Zhang , Kai Liu , Jianchen Zhu , Zhanhui Kang

Training large-scale Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models is bottlenecked by activation memory and expert-parallel communication, yet FP4 training remains impractical on Hopper-class GPUs without native MXFP4 or NVFP4 support. In this work, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Wuyue Zhang , Chongdong Huang , Chunbo You , Cheng Gu , Fengjuan Wang , Mou Sun

Quantizing deep networks with adaptive bit-widths is a promising technique for efficient inference across many devices and resource constraints. In contrast to static methods that repeat the quantization process and train different models…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-09-20 Ximeng Sun , Rameswar Panda , Chun-Fu Chen , Naigang Wang , Bowen Pan , Kailash Gopalakrishnan , Aude Oliva , Rogerio Feris , Kate Saenko

Large Language Models (LLMs) training is prohibitively expensive, driving interest in low-precision fully-quantized training (FQT). While novel 4-bit formats like NVFP4 offer substantial efficiency gains, achieving near-lossless training at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Yuxiang Chen , Yifan Liu , Xiaoming Xu , Pengle Zhang , Michael Beyer , Martin Rapp , Jun Zhu , Jianfei Chen