Related papers: Pretraining large language models with MXFP4 on Na…
Training large transformers is slow, but recent innovations on GPU architecture give us an advantage. NVIDIA Ampere GPUs can execute a fine-grained 2:4 sparse matrix multiplication twice as fast as its dense equivalent. In the light of this…
Reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models (LLMs) is increasingly bottlenecked by rollout (generation), where long output sequence lengths make attention and KV-cache memory dominate end-to-end step time. FP8 offers an attractive…
Naive joint training of large language models (LLMs) for multilingual preference alignment can suffer from negative interference. This is a known issue in multilingual training, where conflicting objectives degrade overall performance.…
Training Large Language Models (LLMs) is highly memory-intensive due to optimizer state overhead. The FRUGAL framework mitigates this with gradient splitting, but its static hyperparameters -- the subspace ratio ($\rho$) and update…
Fine-tuning over large pretrained language models (PLMs) has established many state-of-the-art results. Despite its superior performance, such fine-tuning can be unstable, resulting in significant variance in performance and potential risks…
Teams that have trained large Transformer-based models have reported training instabilities at large scale that did not appear when training with the same hyperparameters at smaller scales. Although the causes of such instabilities are of…
As large language models (LLMs) grow in parameter size and context length, computation precision has been reduced from 16-bit to 4-bit to improve inference efficiency. However, this reduction causes accuracy degradation due to activation…
Large language models have gained significant traction and popularity in recent times, extending their usage to code-generation tasks. While this field has garnered considerable attention, the exploration of testing and evaluating the…
Continuously adapting pre-trained models to local data on resource constrained edge devices is the $\emph{last mile}$ for model deployment. However, as models increase in size and depth, backpropagation requires a large amount of memory,…
Large language models (LLMs) have made significant strides in complex tasks, yet their widespread adoption is impeded by substantial computational demands. With hundreds of billion parameters, transformer-based LLMs necessitate months of…
Trainings of Large Language Models are generally bottlenecked by matrix multiplications. In the Transformer architecture, a large portion of these operations happens in the Feed Forward Network (FFN), and this portion increases for larger…
Transformers trained in low precision can suffer forward-error amplification. We give a first-order, module-wise theory that predicts when and where errors grow. For self-attention we derive a per-layer bound that factorizes into three…
A major recent advance in quantization is given by microscaled 4-bit formats such as NVFP4 and MXFP4, quantizing values into small groups sharing a scale, assuming a fixed floating-point grid. In this paper, we study the following natural…
Floating-point inconsistencies across compilers can undermine the reliability of numerical software. We present LLM4FP, the first framework that uses Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate floating-point programs specifically designed to…
The MXFP4 microscaling format, which partitions tensors into blocks of 32 elements sharing an E8M0 scaling factor, has emerged as a promising substrate for efficient LLM inference, backed by native hardware support on NVIDIA Blackwell…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced rapidly but face significant memory demands. While quantization has shown promise for LLMs, current methods typically require lengthy training to alleviate the performance degradation from…
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…
The impressive performance of large language models (LLMs) arises from their massive scale and heterogeneous module composition. However, this structural heterogeneity introduces additional optimization challenges. While adaptive optimizers…
Large language models (LLMs) demand substantial computational and memory resources, creating deployment challenges. Quantization-aware training (QAT) addresses these challenges by reducing model precision while maintaining performance.…
Loss spikes remain a persistent obstacle in large-scale language model pretraining. While previous research has attempted to identify the root cause of loss spikes by investigating individual factors, we observe that, in practice, such…