← 研踪 PaperTrailarXiv:2611.16426 · v1
SoScale: Second-Order Scale Search for FP4 Quantization
首次提交 2026-11-12 15:36
版本更新 2026-11-12 15:36
雷达观测 2026-11-13 14:15
摘要
Low-bit quantization reduces the memory footprint and inference cost of large language models (LLMs), yet accurate FP4 quantization remains challenging. Practical formats such as MXFP4, NVFP4, and HiF4 pair a 4-bit floating-point payload with block-wise or hierarchical scale codes, making accuracy highly sensitive to how each local distribution is scaled. Default maximum-absolute-value scaling preserves dynamic range, but can spend scarce FP4 levels on rarely occupied outlier regions and leave dense tensor values poorly resolved. Existing scale-search methods minimize local element-wise reconstruction error, optimizing tensor fidelity rather than layer-output fidelity. We propose SoScale, a second-order weight scale-code search method for hierarchical FP4 quantization. SoScale searches hardware-valid scale codes under a Hessian-aware layer reconstruction objective and couples this search with GPTQ-style error recovery, selecting scales by their impact on layer outputs. Across Qwen3 models, SoScale consistently reduces downstream quantization degradation under MXFP4, NVFP4, and HiF4.
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v1 · 2026-11-12 15:36 · 最新观测版本
SoScale: Second-Order Scale Search for FP4 Quantization
Low-bit quantization reduces the memory footprint and inference cost of large language models (LLMs), yet accurate FP4 quantization remains challenging. Practical formats such as MXFP4, NVFP4, and HiF4 pair a 4-bit floating-point payload with block-wise or hierarchical scale codes, making accuracy highly sensitive to how each local distribution is scaled. Default maximum-absolute-value scaling preserves dynamic range, but can spend scarce FP4 levels on rarely occupied outlier regions and leave dense tensor values poorly resolved. Existing scale-search methods minimize local element-wise reconstruction error, optimizing tensor fidelity rather than layer-output fidelity. We propose SoScale, a second-order weight scale-code search method for hierarchical FP4 quantization. SoScale searches hardware-valid scale codes under a Hessian-aware layer reconstruction objective and couples this search with GPTQ-style error recovery, selecting scales by their impact on layer outputs. Across Qwen3 models, SoScale consistently reduces downstream quantization degradation under MXFP4, NVFP4, and HiF4.
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