Training large language models (LLMs) in sub-8-bit arithmetic promises substantial gains in memory bandwidth and compute throughput, yet FP4 formats introduce quantization error severe enough to destabilize optimization if left unaddressed. We present ALTO, an open-source training recipe for GPT-OSS-20B, a 20-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts (MoE) model, on the MLPerf Small MoE Training benchmark under the MXFP4 microscaling format. The recipe combines established techniques from Abecassis, Felix et al. [arXiv:2509.25149] (hybrid 1D/2D block quantization, randomized Hadamard transforms, and stochastic rounding) with a simplified weight de-oscillation scheme adapted from TetraJet-v2 [arXiv:2510.27527]. On C4 validation at global batch size 16, MXFP4 + RHT + SR + de-oscillation reaches a validation loss of 3.3350 at 16,128 steps, only 0.007 above the BF16 baseline (3.3283), closing roughly 50% of the gap left by MXFP4 without de-oscillation (3.3418). Measured by steps to reach the MLPerf quality target (validation loss 3.34), de-oscillation cuts the FP4 convergence overhead relative to BF16 from +20.0% to +5.0%. We also report negative end-to-end results from differential gradient estimation, outlier clipping, and macro-block scaling, despite each showing operator-level SNR gains. All experiments use simulated MXFP4 kernels on AMD MI300X hardware and wall-clock speed has not been optimized.
Xiusheng Huang, Zhe Li AMD, Xuanwu Yin Advanced Micro Devices, Lu Wang China Three Gorges Corporation, Yequan Wang Peking University and Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, Dong Li, Emad Barsoum AMD, Kang Liu Institute of automation, Chinese academy of science, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Post-training quantization has emerged as a widely adopted technique for compressing and accelerating the inference of Large Language Models (LLMs). The primary challenges in LLMs quantization stem from activation outliers, which significantly degrade model performance especially at lower bit precision. While recent approaches attempt to mitigate outliers through linear transformations across feature dimensions, our analysis reveals that the transformed weights and activations still exhibit persistent outlier patterns with concentrated magnitude distributions. In this paper, we first model the mathematical relationship between quantization error and outliers, and then introduce a new metric Flatness to quantify the distribution of outliers. Based on this, we derive the theoretical optimal solution with respect to Flatness. Building on these insights, we propose Bidirectional Diagonal Quantization (BDQ), a novel post-training quantization framework that effectively disperses outlier patterns through optimized matrix transformations. BDQ strategically distributes outlier magnitudes across matrix dimensions via learned diagonal operations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BDQ establishes a new quantization benchmark. It achieves less than 1% accuracy drop in W4A4 quantization on the LLaMA-3-8B model. In the more challenging W2A4KV16 experiment, compared to state-of-the-art approaches, BDQ reduces the performance gap by 39.1% on the DeepSeek-R1-Distill-LLaMA-70B model.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表