Related papers: To FP8 and Back Again: Quantifying Reduced Precisi…
In the complex domain of large language models (LLMs), striking a balance between computational efficiency and maintaining model quality is a formidable challenge. Navigating the inherent limitations of uniform quantization, particularly…
This paper presents the first comprehensive empirical study demonstrating the efficacy of the Brain Floating Point (BFLOAT16) half-precision format for Deep Learning training across image classification, speech recognition, language…
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance across various domains. However, the substantial hardware resources required for their training present a significant barrier to efficiency and scalability. To mitigate this…
We propose LLM-FP4 for quantizing both weights and activations in large language models (LLMs) down to 4-bit floating-point values, in a post-training manner. Existing post-training quantization (PTQ) solutions are primarily integer-based…
Recent work has shown that 8-bit floating point (FP8) can be used for efficiently training neural networks with reduced computational cost compared to training in FP32/FP16. In this work, we investigate the use of FP8 training in a…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are now integral across various domains and have demonstrated impressive performance. Progress, however, rests on the premise that benchmark scores are both accurate and reproducible. We demonstrate that the…
Microscaling Floating-Point (MXFP) has emerged as a promising low-precision format for large language models (LLMs). Despite various post-training quantization (PTQ) algorithms being proposed, they mostly focus on integer quantization,…
Training large language models with FP8 formats offers significant efficiency gains. However, the reduced numerical precision of FP8 poses challenges for stable and accurate training. Current frameworks preserve training performance using…
Transformer-based models, such as BERT, have been widely applied in a wide range of natural language processing tasks. However, one inevitable side effect is that they require massive memory storage and inference cost when deployed in…
Large language models (LLMs) require immense resources for training and inference. Quantization, a technique that reduces the precision of model parameters, offers a promising solution for improving LLM efficiency and sustainability. While…
The state-of-the-art hardware platforms for training Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are moving from traditional single precision (32-bit) computations towards 16 bits of precision -- in large part due to the high energy efficiency and smaller…
Meeting service-level objectives (SLOs) in Large Language Models (LLMs) serving is critical, but managing the high variability in load presents a significant challenge. Recent advancements in FP8 inference, backed by native hardware…
Training with larger number of parameters while keeping fast iterations is an increasingly adopted strategy and trend for developing better performing Deep Neural Network (DNN) models. This necessitates increased memory footprint and…
While advancements in quantization have significantly reduced the computational costs of inference in deep learning, training still predominantly relies on complex floating-point arithmetic. Low-precision fixed-point training presents a…
Training large language models (LLMs) models directly in low-precision offers a way to address computational costs by improving both throughput and energy efficiency. For those purposes, NVIDIA's recent Blackwell architecture facilitates…
Fluid dynamics simulations with the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) are very memory-intensive. Alongside reduction in memory footprint, significant performance benefits can be achieved by using FP32 (single) precision compared to FP64…
Training large language models is an expensive, compute-bound process that must be repeated as models scale, algorithms improve, and new data is collected. To address this, next-generation hardware accelerators increasingly support…
Quantization is a powerful tool for accelerating large language model (LLM) inference, but the accuracy-performance trade-offs across different formats remain unclear. In this paper, we conduct the most comprehensive empirical study to…
Large foundation models have become central to modern machine learning, with performance scaling predictably with model size and data. However, training and deploying such models incur substantial computational and memory costs, motivating…
FP8 formats are gaining popularity to boost the computational efficiency for training and inference of large deep learning models. Their main challenge is that a careful choice of scaling is needed to prevent degradation due to the reduced…