arXiv:2603.08747cs.ARcs.AI2026-03被引 2

分析两种4比特浮点格式在大模型中的敏感性,指导高效部署

Diagnosing FP4 inference: a layer-wise and block-wise sensitivity analysis of NVFP4 and MXFP4

  • 分层分块隔离分析两种FP4格式的量化敏感度
  • MLP层对4比特量化最敏感,注意力层次之,门控层最不敏感
  • 早期层可能比末尾层更敏感,适用于模型优化与部署

量化通过缓解大语言模型(LLM)的内存压力和带宽拥堵,显著提升计算效率,同时保持可接受的精度损失。四比特浮点(FP4)作为保留指数位和符号位等关键数值特性的最低精度格式,已开始被黑水(Blackwell)和AMD CDNA等前沿架构采用,用于支持LLM量化并降低部署成本。尽管激进量化能带来效率提升,但其在Transformer各层内的敏感性,以及不同FP4格式和模型规模间的泛化性仍不明确。本研究系统分析了两种FP4格式(MXFP4与NVFP4)在三个Qwen2.5模型规模(0.5B、7B、14B)下的表现,采用受控的组件级与模块级隔离方法。结果表明:MLP上投影与下投影层始终具有最高敏感度,而门控与注意力投影层则分别中度和显著更低敏感。此外,敏感性并不总集中在最后几层,早期层在MXFP4下也可能高度敏感。研究为FP4推理在组件、深度及格式间的特性提供了诊断性刻画。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Quantization addresses the high resource demand for large language models (LLMs) by alleviating memory pressure and bandwidth congestion and providing significantly scaled compute power with a tolerable impact on accuracy. Four-bit floating point (FP4), the lowest-precision format that preserves essential numerical properties such as exponent and sign, has begun to be adopted in cutting-edge architectures, including Blackwell and AMD CDNA, to support LLM quantization and reduce deployment costs. Although aggressive quantization can yield efficiency gains, the quantization sensitivity of within-transformer layers and whether these sensitivities generalize across existing FP4 formats and model scales remain underexplored. To elucidate quantization sensitivity, this study conducts a systematic analysis of two FP4 formats, MXFP4 and NVFP4, across three Qwen2.5 model scales (0.5B, 7B, and 14B), using controlled component-wise and block-wise isolation methodologies. We observe that MLP up- and down-projection layers consistently dominate in terms of sensitivity, while gate and attention projections are moderately and substantially less sensitive to FP4 quantization, respectively. We further find that sensitivity does not universally localize to the final blocks, but early blocks can be highly sensitive, particularly under MXFP4. Our results provide a diagnostic characterization of the inference behavior of FP4 across components, depths, and FP4 formats.

量化大模型推理优化FP4

Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。