Related papers: HiFloat4 Format for Language Model Inference

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…

We introduce Phi-4-Mini and Phi-4-Multimodal, compact yet highly capable language and multimodal models. Phi-4-Mini is a 3.8-billion-parameter language model trained on high-quality web and synthetic data, significantly outperforming recent…

The increasing computational and memory demands of large language models (LLMs) necessitate innovative approaches to optimize resource usage without compromising performance. This paper leverages microscaling floating-point formats, a novel…

We demonstrate, for the first time, fully quantized training (FQT) of large language models (LLMs) using predominantly 4-bit floating-point (FP4) precision for weights, activations, and gradients on datasets up to 200 billion tokens. We…

Modern AI hardware, such as Nvidia's Blackwell architecture, is increasingly embracing low-precision floating-point (FP) formats to handle the pervasive activation outliers in Large Language Models (LLMs). Despite this industry trend, a…

The explosive growth of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as GPT-4 with 1.8 trillion parameters, demands a fundamental rethinking of data center architecture to ensure scalability, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness. Our work provides a…

Large language models (LLMs) demand extensive memory capacity during both fine-tuning and inference. To enable memory-efficient fine-tuning, existing methods apply block-wise quantization techniques, such as NF4 and AF4, to the network…

The IEEE 754 floating-point standard is the bedrock of modern computing, but its structural requirements -- a hidden leading bit, Base-2 bit-level normalization, and Sign-Magnitude encoding -- impose significant silicon area and power…

Federated learning is a promising paradigm that allows multiple clients to collaboratively train a model without sharing the local data. However, the presence of heterogeneous devices in federated learning, such as mobile phones and IoT…

FP8 is a natural progression for accelerating deep learning training inference beyond the 16-bit formats common in modern processors. In this paper we propose an 8-bit floating point (FP8) binary interchange format consisting of two…

Large language models (LLMs) have grown beyond the memory capacity of single GPU devices, necessitating quantization techniques for practical deployment. While NF4 (4-bit NormalFloat) quantization enables 4$\times$ memory reduction,…

Diffusion models are emerging models that generate images by iteratively denoising random Gaussian noise using deep neural networks. These models typically exhibit high computational and memory demands, necessitating effective post-training…

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…

Reducing hardware overhead of neural networks for faster or lower power inference and training is an active area of research. Uniform quantization using integer multiply-add has been thoroughly investigated, which requires learning many…

Quantization has emerged as a standard technique for accelerating inference for generative models by enabling faster low-precision computations and reduced memory transfers. Recently, GPU accelerators have added first-class support for…

Large-scale AI models, such as Large Language Models (LLMs) and Diffusion Models (DMs), have grown rapidly in size, creating significant challenges for efficient deployment on resource-constrained hardware. In this paper, we introduce…

Low-precision formats have proven to be an efficient way to reduce not only the memory footprint but also the hardware resources and power consumption of deep learning computations. Under this premise, the posit numerical format appears to…

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,…

Existing low-bit Microscaling (MX) formats, such as MXFP4, often suffer from substantial accuracy degradation due to the use of a shared scaling factor with the Power-of-Two format. In this work, we explore strategies that introduce minimal…

In recent years fused-multiply-add (FMA) units with lower-precision multiplications and higher-precision accumulation have proven useful in machine learning/artificial intelligence applications, most notably in training deep neural networks…