Echo: Error-Compensated 4-Bit Tensor-Parallel Communication for LLM Training and Inference
Tensor parallelism ends every layer with an all-reduce that sits between two dependent matrix multiplications, so its cost cannot be hidden and grows as compute outpaces interconnect bandwidth. Sending 4-bit instead of 16-bit values would cut this cost by nearly 4x, but the all-reduce must add the values it carries, and rounding the sum injects an error at every call. Model quality depends on how these errors accumulate over layers, yet existing methods treat each call on its own. We present Echo, a 4-bit all-reduce for training and inference that controls the accumulated error. Echo moves data in 4 bits and sums in high precision, so each value is quantized at most twice per call for any...
| Authors | Xingyu Xie, Xiaoyong Xie, Zhouchen Lin et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 9 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 9 October 2026 |
Popularity, last 2 days
0 now. Counts as reported by the source, snapshotted daily by Silytics.
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 Information may be incomplete or out of date.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.