Stable FP4 Training via Transposition-Invariant Block Quantization
Reducing training precision is a key lever for improving the e ciency of large language model (LLM) training, but pushing beyond FP8 to 4-bit oating point (FP4) remains challenging due to instability during optimization. We identify a fundamental source of this instability in existing microscaling approaches: scale inconsistency induced by tensor transposition. In conventional 1D block quantization, forward and backward passes assign di erent scaling factors to the same values after transposition, leading to biased and unstable gradient updates. To address this issue, we propose a low-precision training framework based on 2D block FP4 quantization, which enforces transposition-invariant s...
| Authors | Mehdi Rahimifar, Amin Darabi, Mehran Taghian Jazi et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 27 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 27 July 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.