AIS adaptively corrects non-stationary policy gradient bias in quantized LLM RL, matching BF16 performance while retaining 1.5-2.76x FP8 rollout speedup.
FP8-LM: Training FP8 Large Language Models
13 Pith papers cite this work, alongside 3 external citations. Polarity classification is still indexing.
abstract
In this paper, we explore FP8 low-bit data formats for efficient training of large language models (LLMs). Our key insight is that most variables, such as gradients and optimizer states, in LLM training can employ low-precision data formats without compromising model accuracy and requiring no changes to hyper-parameters. Specifically, we propose a new FP8 automatic mixed-precision framework for training LLMs. This framework offers three levels of FP8 utilization to streamline mixed-precision and distributed parallel training for LLMs. It gradually incorporates 8-bit gradients, optimizer states, and distributed learning in an incremental manner. Experiment results show that, during the training of GPT-175B model on H100 GPU platform, our FP8 mixed-precision training framework not only achieved a remarkable 39% reduction in real memory usage but also ran 75% faster than the widely adopted BF16 framework (i.e., Megatron-LM), surpassing the speed of Nvidia Transformer Engine by 37%. This largely reduces the training costs for large foundation models. Furthermore, our FP8 mixed-precision training methodology is generic. It can be seamlessly applied to other tasks such as LLM instruction tuning and reinforcement learning with human feedback, offering savings in fine-tuning expenses. Our FP8 low-precision training framework is open-sourced at {https://github.com/Azure/MS-AMP}{aka.ms/MS.AMP}.
citation-role summary
citation-polarity summary
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background 2representative citing papers
Low-precision Flash Attention fails due to similar low-rank attention representations combined with biased rounding errors that accumulate and corrupt weight updates; a minimal fix to reduce rounding bias stabilizes training.
Transforming gradients into K-FAC-based coordinates before FP8 quantization reduces communication error and improves downstream task preservation over Euclidean FP8, with a 7.6% end-to-end speedup on 64 GH200 GPUs.
A CPU-GPU hybrid design with stream-loading prefill, expert parallelism, and disaggregation achieves cloud SLOs for local MoE inference on dual-socket CPUs and consumer GPUs.
Entrain reduces microbatch workload variability by up to 10.6x and improves multimodal LLM training throughput by 1.4x via static model parallelism and deferred hierarchical microbatch assignment.
AGoQ delivers up to 52% lower memory use and 1.34x faster training for 8B-32B LLaMA models by using near-4-bit adaptive activations and 8-bit gradients while preserving pretraining convergence and downstream accuracy.
StoSignSGD resolves SignSGD divergence on non-smooth objectives via structural stochasticity, matching optimal convex rates and improving non-convex bounds while delivering 1.44-2.14x speedups in FP8 LLM pretraining.
AdaHOP applies pattern-aware Hadamard transforms and selective outlier extraction to enable from-scratch MXFP4 training of LLMs at BF16 quality with up to 3.6X memory compression and 1.46X speedup.
BOOST delivers 1.46-2.27x end-to-end speedups for low-rank bottleneck LLMs by redesigning tensor parallelism around the bottleneck structure plus supporting optimizations.
GNMR is a gradient-norm-based controller that maps local stability signals to budgeted recovery actions to stabilize low-precision LLM training while preserving quality.
Orthogonal growth recycles pre-trained MoE checkpoints via layer copying and noisy expert duplication, delivering 10.6% higher accuracy than training from scratch with equivalent extra compute.
NVILA improves on VILA with a scale-then-compress visual token strategy and full-lifecycle efficiency optimizations, matching or exceeding leading VLMs on image and video benchmarks while reducing training cost 1.9-5.1x and latencies 1.2-2.8x.
Identifies amax saturation and catastrophic forgetting in HiF8 W8A8 QAT for OpenPangu-Embedded-1B and mitigates them with 64-step max-window DTS and 500-step BF16 warmup at lr=1e-5 to achieve under 0.6% benchmark drops.
citing papers explorer
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AIS: Adaptive Importance Sampling for Quantized RL
AIS adaptively corrects non-stationary policy gradient bias in quantized LLM RL, matching BF16 performance while retaining 1.5-2.76x FP8 rollout speedup.
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Why Low-Precision Transformer Training Fails: An Analysis on Flash Attention
Low-precision Flash Attention fails due to similar low-rank attention representations combined with biased rounding errors that accumulate and corrupt weight updates; a minimal fix to reduce rounding bias stabilizes training.
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GIFT: Geometry-Informed Low-precision Gradient Communication for LLM Pretraining
Transforming gradients into K-FAC-based coordinates before FP8 quantization reduces communication error and improves downstream task preservation over Euclidean FP8, with a 7.6% end-to-end speedup on 64 GH200 GPUs.
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Achieving Cloud-Grade SLOs for Local Mixture-of-Experts Inference through CPU-GPU Hybrid Design
A CPU-GPU hybrid design with stream-loading prefill, expert parallelism, and disaggregation achieves cloud SLOs for local MoE inference on dual-socket CPUs and consumer GPUs.
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Addressing Variable Heterogeneity in Distributed Multimodal Training with Entrain
Entrain reduces microbatch workload variability by up to 10.6x and improves multimodal LLM training throughput by 1.4x via static model parallelism and deferred hierarchical microbatch assignment.
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AGoQ: Activation and Gradient Quantization for Memory-Efficient Distributed Training of LLMs
AGoQ delivers up to 52% lower memory use and 1.34x faster training for 8B-32B LLaMA models by using near-4-bit adaptive activations and 8-bit gradients while preserving pretraining convergence and downstream accuracy.
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StoSignSGD: Unbiased Structural Stochasticity Fixes SignSGD for Training Large Language Models
StoSignSGD resolves SignSGD divergence on non-smooth objectives via structural stochasticity, matching optimal convex rates and improving non-convex bounds while delivering 1.44-2.14x speedups in FP8 LLM pretraining.
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AdaHOP: Fast and Accurate Low-Precision Training via Outlier-Pattern-Aware Rotation
AdaHOP applies pattern-aware Hadamard transforms and selective outlier extraction to enable from-scratch MXFP4 training of LLMs at BF16 quality with up to 3.6X memory compression and 1.46X speedup.
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BOOST: BOttleneck-Optimized Scalable Training Framework for Low-Rank Large Language Models
BOOST delivers 1.46-2.27x end-to-end speedups for low-rank bottleneck LLMs by redesigning tensor parallelism around the bottleneck structure plus supporting optimizations.
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GNMR: Runtime Stability Control for Low-Precision Large Language Model Training
GNMR is a gradient-norm-based controller that maps local stability signals to budgeted recovery actions to stabilize low-precision LLM training while preserving quality.
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Beyond Sunk Costs: Boosting LLM Pre-training Efficiency via Orthogonal Growth of Mixture-of-Experts
Orthogonal growth recycles pre-trained MoE checkpoints via layer copying and noisy expert duplication, delivering 10.6% higher accuracy than training from scratch with equivalent extra compute.
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NVILA: Efficient Frontier Visual Language Models
NVILA improves on VILA with a scale-then-compress visual token strategy and full-lifecycle efficiency optimizations, matching or exceeding leading VLMs on image and video benchmarks while reducing training cost 1.9-5.1x and latencies 1.2-2.8x.
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Max-Window Scale Estimation for Near-Lossless HiF8 W8A8 Quantization-Aware Training
Identifies amax saturation and catastrophic forgetting in HiF8 W8A8 QAT for OpenPangu-Embedded-1B and mitigates them with 64-step max-window DTS and 500-step BF16 warmup at lr=1e-5 to achieve under 0.6% benchmark drops.