[Submitted on 4 Sep 2026]
Title:Format-Aware Fusion for Fast FP4 Pretraining
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Abstract:Four-bit floating-point (FP4) Tensor Cores accelerate matrix multiplication, but scale computation, operand packing, layout construction, and saved backward state can erase the gain. We present \emph{format-aware fusion}, which co-designs each quantization producer with its scale domain and consumer layout for native \mxfp{}, global \nvfp{}, and cooperative-thread-array-local \nvfp{}. We evaluate Llama-3-family 8B pretraining through 160 billion tokens using bfloat16 output projections and compiled cross entropy. In matched same-accelerator probes, bfloat16 and Transformer Engine \nvfp{} reach 18.8K and 27.6K tokens/s/GPU, while our fastest custom route reaches 37.9K. \mxfp{} with row-gradient stochastic rounding and fixed-sign 32-value Hadamard weight-gradient preconditioning reaches 37.2K tokens/s/GPU (86.3\% bfloat16 model FLOP utilization) and ends 2.11\% above the raw bfloat16 training-loss endpoint. A Transformer Engine recipe with four final bfloat16 blocks ends 0.87\% above bfloat16 at 27.1K tokens/s/GPU. Downstream rankings differ from training-loss rankings, showing that FP4 outcomes depend jointly on scale contract, operand, and execution path.
Subjects:
Machine Learning (cs.LG)
Cite as: arXiv:2610.00053 [cs.LG]
(or arXiv:2610.00053v1 [cs.LG] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.00053
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
Submission history
From: Robert Hu [view email] [v1] Fri, 4 Sep 2026 00:42:51 UTC (2,481 KB)
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