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Four Over Six: More Accurate NVFP4 Quantization with Adaptive Block Scaling

12 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

12 Pith papers citing it
abstract

As large language models have grown larger, interest has grown in low-precision numerical formats such as NVFP4 as a way to improve speed and reduce memory usage. However, quantizing models to NVFP4 remains challenging as the lack of precision generally degrades model performance. In this work, we address this issue with Four Over Six (4/6), a modification to the block-scaled NVFP4 quantization algorithm that yields reduced quantization error. Unlike integer formats, floating point formats have non-uniform step sizes which create larger quantization error on larger values. 4/6 takes advantage of this by adaptively scaling some blocks to smaller FP4 values, making the distribution of representable values more uniform and reducing quantization error for near-maximal values. We show that 4/6 can be implemented efficiently on modern hardware accelerators, resulting in performance gains during both pre-training and inference with minimal computational overhead. In pre-training experiments with the Nemotron 3 Nano 30B-A3B model architecture, we find that 4/6 brings training loss closer to BF16 compared to models trained with current state-of-the-art NVFP4 training recipes. Our code is available at https://github.com/mit-han-lab/fouroversix.

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representative citing papers

Normalized Architectures are Natively 4-Bit

cs.LG · 2026-05-07 · conditional · novelty 6.0

nGPT's hypersphere constraint makes dot-product signal accumulate constructively under 4-bit quantization while noise averages out, enabling native low-precision training.

QuantClaw: Precision Where It Matters for OpenClaw

cs.AI · 2026-04-24 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

QuantClaw dynamically routes precision in agent workflows to cut cost by up to 21.4% and latency by 15.7% while keeping or improving task performance.

MixFP4: Enhancing NVFP4 with Adaptive FP4/INT4 Block Representations

cs.AR · 2026-05-29 · unverdicted · novelty 5.0

MixFP4 extends NVFP4 by adaptively selecting between two FP4 micro-formats per block using repurposed scale sign bits and a unified E2M2 compute path, claiming better accuracy than standard NVFP4 at 3.1% area and 1.5% power overhead.

Finer is Better (with the Right Scaling)

cs.LG · 2026-05-08 · unverdicted · novelty 5.0 · 2 refs

The block-size paradox in LLM microscaling is caused by underflow in subnormal E4M3 scaling factors; preventing underflow and using 4-over-6 selection resolves it, with brute-force confirming MSE strictly improves as blocks get finer.

DuQuant++: Fine-grained Rotation Enhances Microscaling FP4 Quantization

cs.CV · 2026-04-20 · unverdicted · novelty 4.0

DuQuant++ adapts outlier-aware fine-grained rotation to MXFP4 by matching block size to the 32-element microscaling group, enabling a single rotation that smooths distributions and achieves SOTA performance on LLaMA-3 with lower cost.

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