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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,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Manyi Zhang , Ji-Fu Li , Zhongao Sun , Haoli Bai , Hui-Ling Zhen , Zhenhua Dong , Xianzhi Yu

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…

We propose MindVL, a multimodal large language model (MLLMs) trained on Ascend NPUs. The training of state-of-the-art MLLMs is often confined to a limited set of hardware platforms and relies heavily on massive, undisclosed data recipes,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Feilong Chen , Yijiang Liu , Yi Huang , Hao Wang , Miren Tian , Ya-Qi Yu , Minghui Liao , Jihao Wu

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-30 Mengzhao Chen , Meng Wu , Hui Jin , Zhihang Yuan , Jing Liu , Chaoyi Zhang , Yunshui Li , Jie Huang , Jin Ma , Zeyue Xue , Zhiheng Liu , Xingyan Bin , Ping Luo

The recent hardware-accelerated microscaling 4-bit floating-point formats such as MXFP4 and NVFP4, supported on NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, promise to revolutionize large language model (LLM) inference. Yet, their practical benefits remain…

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,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Xiangbo Qi , Chaoyi Jiang , Murali Annavaram

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…

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-22 Xiao-Yang Liu , Jie Zhang , Guoxuan Wang , Weiqing Tong , Anwar Walid

As Large Language Models (LLMs) scale, weight-only quantization (W4A16: 4-bit weights, 16-bit activations) becomes critical for reducing memory footprint with minimal accuracy loss. However, its efficient deployment on Huawei's Ascend 910…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Yuanhong He , Peiyu Niu , Jun Chen , Chenchen Zhang , Chao Yang

This preliminary white paper proposes a novel 8-bit floating-point data format HiFloat8 (abbreviated as HiF8) for deep learning. HiF8 features tapered precision. For normal value encoding, it provides 7 exponent values with 3-bit mantissa,…

Efficient deployment of large language models (LLMs) necessitates low-bit quantization to minimize model size and inference cost. While low-bit integer formats (e.g., INT8/INT4) have been the conventional choice, emerging low-bit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-23 Yijia Zhang , Lingran Zhao , Shijie Cao , Wenqiang Wang , Ting Cao , Fan Yang , Mao Yang , Shanghang Zhang , Ningyi Xu

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Saaketh Narayan , Abhay Gupta , Mansheej Paul , Davis Blalock

Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly increasing in size, with the number of parameters becoming a key factor in the success of many commercial models, such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Bard. Even the recently released publicly accessible…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-19 Somnath Roy

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

Large-scale convolutional neural networks (CNNs) suffer from very long training times, spanning from hours to weeks, limiting the productivity and experimentation of deep learning practitioners. As networks grow in size and complexity,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-06-18 Aditya Rajagopal , Diederik Adriaan Vink , Stylianos I. Venieris , Christos-Savvas Bouganis

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have made remarkable progress, with model optimization primarily relying on gradient-based optimizers such as Adam. However, these gradient-based methods impose stringent hardware requirements,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-24 WenTao Liu , Siyu Song , Hao Hao , Aimin Zhou

The rapid advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly the Large Language Models (LLMs), have profoundly affected our daily work and communication forms. However, it is still a challenge to deploy LLMs on resource-constrained…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Mingqiang Huang , Ao Shen , Kai Li , Haoxiang Peng , Boyu Li , Yupeng Su , Hao Yu

As deep learning models grow and deployment becomes more widespread, reducing the storage and transmission costs of neural network weights has become increasingly important. While prior work such as ZipNN has shown that lossless compression…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-28 Anat Heilper , Doron Singer

For large language models (LLMs), post-training quantization (PTQ) can significantly reduce memory footprint and computational overhead. Model quantization is rapidly evolving. Though many papers report breakthrough results, they are often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Yutong Liu , Cairong Zhao , Guosheng Hu