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Large Language Models (LLMs) have intensified the need for low-precision formats that enable efficient, large-scale inference. The Open Compute Project (OCP) Microscaling (MX) standard is attractive due to its favorable hardware efficiency,…

Existing weight-activation quantization methods for Large Language Models (LLMs) primarily address channel-wise outliers but often neglect token-wise outliers, which limits the accuracy of quantized models. In this work, we propose…

Outliers have emerged as a fundamental bottleneck in preserving accuracy for low-precision large models, particularly within Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures that are increasingly central to large-scale language modeling. Under…

Post-training quantization (PTQ) is a widely used approach for reducing the memory and compute costs of large language models (LLMs). Recent studies have shown that applying invertible transformations to activations can significantly…

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…

The significant resource requirements associated with Large-scale Language Models (LLMs) have generated considerable interest in the development of techniques aimed at compressing and accelerating neural networks. Among these techniques,…

Quantization of large language models (LLMs) faces significant challenges, particularly due to the presence of outlier activations that impede efficient low-bit representation. Traditional approaches predominantly address Normal Outliers,…

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…

Post-training quantization (PTQ) techniques applied to weights, activations, and the KV cache greatly reduce memory usage, latency, and power consumption of Large Language Models (LLMs), but may lead to large quantization errors when…

Training LLMs at ultra-low precision remains a formidable challenge. Direct low-bit QAT often suffers from convergence instability and substantial training costs, exacerbated by quantization noise from heavy-tailed outlier channels and…

Low-bit post-training quantization (PTQ) is a pivotal technique for deploying Vision-Language Models (VLMs) on resource-constrained devices. However, existing PTQ methods often degrade VLMs' accuracy due to the heterogeneous activation…

Quantization addresses the high resource demand for large language models (LLMs) by alleviating memory pressure and bandwidth congestion and providing significantly scaled compute power with a tolerable impact on accuracy. Four-bit floating…

To overcome the burden on the memory size and bandwidth due to ever-increasing size of large language models (LLMs), aggressive weight quantization has been recently studied, while lacking research on quantizing activations. In this paper,…

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in NLP, but their demands hinder their widespread deployment. While Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) offers a solution, its extensive training costs make Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) a more practical…

Quantization-aware training (QAT) is typically performed for a single target numeric format, while practical deployments often need to choose numerical precision at inference time based on hardware support or runtime constraints. We study…

Quantizing the activations of large language models (LLMs) has been a significant challenge due to the presence of structured outliers. Most existing methods focus on the per-token or per-tensor quantization of activations, making it…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have distinguished themselves with outstanding performance in complex language modeling tasks, yet they come with significant computational and storage challenges. This paper explores the potential of…

Post-training quantization (PTQ) compresses the weights and activations of large language models (LLMs) into low-precision representations to reduce memory footprint and accelerate inference. However, the presence of outliers in weights and…

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…

Large Language Models (LLMs) quantization facilitates deploying LLMs in resource-limited settings, but existing methods that combine incompatible gradient optimization and quantization truncation lead to serious convergence pathology. This…