Hardware-Aware FP4 FlashAttention-4
Blackwell's 4-bit floating-point (FP4) tensor cores do not automatically make attention faster because softmax conversion and on-chip dependencies dominate once its matrix products shrink. We address this with \emph{Direct-P} for noncausal inference and a causal path that passes the forward quantization directly into backward. Direct-P maps scores directly to FP4 probabilities and reaches up to 2.13$\times$ the bfloat16 (BF16) forward throughput on an NVIDIA GB200. The causal path reconstructs probabilities from saved quantized queries and keys and uses 8-bit floating-point (FP8) gradient operands, accelerating a complete single-GPU 8-billion-parameter update by up to 1.14$\times$. Matche...
| Authors | Robert Hu |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 3 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 3 September 2026 |
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