Related papers: Recipes for Pre-training LLMs with MXFP8

In this paper, we explore FP8 low-bit data formats for efficient training of large language models (LLMs). Our key insight is that most variables, such as gradients and optimizer states, in LLM training can employ low-precision data formats…

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…

Narrow bit-width data formats are key to reducing the computational and storage costs of modern deep learning applications. This paper evaluates Microscaling (MX) data formats that combine a per-block scaling factor with narrow…

Quantization significantly accelerates inference in large language models (LLMs) by replacing original high-precision matrices with low-precision counterparts. Recent advances in weight-activation quantization have primarily focused on…

Despite the significant potential of FP8 data formats for large language model (LLM) pre-training, their adoption has been limited due to challenges in maintaining stability at scale. Existing approaches often rely on suboptimal…

As the demand for deep learning grows, cost reduction through quantization has become essential for both training and inference. In 2022, the Open Compute Project (OCP) consortium standardized narrow precision formats for deep learning,…

Large Language Model training with 8-bit floating point (FP8) formats promises significant efficiency improvements, but reduced numerical precision makes training challenging. It is currently possible to train in FP8 only if one is willing…

Low precision (LP) datatypes such as MXFP4 can accelerate matrix multiplications (GEMMs) and reduce training costs. However, directly using MXFP4 instead of BF16 during training significantly degrades model quality. In this work, we present…

Large language models (LLMs) are computationally intensive. The computation workload and the memory footprint grow quadratically with the dimension (layer width). Most of LLMs' parameters come from the linear layers of the transformer…

Pre-training Transformers in FP4 precision is becoming a promising approach to gain substantial speedup, but it comes with a considerable loss of accuracy. Microscaling (MX) data format provides a fine-grained per-group quantization method…

Reduced-precision data formats are crucial for cost-effective serving of large language models (LLMs). While numerous reduced-precision formats have been introduced thus far, they often require intrusive modifications to the software…

We present LLMQ, an end-to-end CUDA/C++ implementation for medium-sized language-model training, e.g. 3B to 32B parameters, on affordable, commodity GPUs. These devices are characterized by low memory availability and slow communication…

The burgeoning computational demands for training large language models (LLMs) necessitate efficient methods, including quantized training, which leverages low-bit arithmetic operations to reduce costs. While FP8 precision has shown…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have attracted significant attention due to their human-like language understanding and generation capabilities, as well as their applicability across various domains. These models, characterized by their…

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,…

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are undergoing rapid progress and represent the frontier of AI development. However, their training and inference efficiency have emerged as a core bottleneck in making MLLMs more accessible and…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are typically trained in two phases: pre-training on large internet-scale datasets, and fine-tuning for downstream tasks. Given the higher computational demand of pre-training, it's intuitive to assume that…

In this work, we propose a low-bit training framework for convolutional neural networks, which is built around a novel multi-level scaling (MLS) tensor format. Our framework focuses on reducing the energy consumption of convolution…

Matrix multiplication performance has long been the major bottleneck to scaling deep learning workloads, which has stimulated the design of new accelerators that use increasingly low-precision number formats. However, improvements in matrix…

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…