arXiv:2603.10444cs.LGcs.AI2026-03

FP4训练崩溃的元凶是激活均值偏置,解决它就能稳定训练。

The Curse and Blessing of Mean Bias in FP4-Quantized LLM Training

  • 训练前分离激活中的共性均值分量,再做四比特量化
  • 在0.6B和7B模型上将损失差距压至1.19%/0.81%以下
  • 计算开销仅2.2%,适合硬件部署且可与现有方法互补

FP4训练能大幅降低大语言模型的内存与计算开销,但因块内量化受极端激活幅值影响而脆弱,导致动态范围扩大并压缩长尾信号。我们发现失败的根本原因并非随机稀疏事件,而是由一个与主各向异性谱分量对齐的秩一均值偏置主导,该偏置在训练中持续增强,经注意力与前馈网络放大重塑,逐步主导最高激活幅值。这一发现揭示:看似复杂的异常值抑制问题,实则可用简单方案解决——在量化前分离出共性均值。为此提出Averis,一种仅用归约与逐元素减法实现均值-残差分离的量化方法。在Qwen3 0.6B Dense(100B tokens)与Qwen3 7B A1.5B MoE(50B tokens)上,Averis实现稳定的W4A4G4 FP4训练,将BF16损失差距降至1.19%/0.81%(对比NVIDIA哈达玛方法的2.05%/1.10%),下游任务差距控制在0.89/0.71点。整体端到端开销仅2.20%,约为哈达玛方法的30%,提供高效低比特训练路径。与哈达玛方法结合后,Qwen3-0.6B损失与下游差距进一步降至0.94%和0.73点。代码已开源。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

FP4 training promises substantial memory and compute savings for large language models, but remains fragile because blockwise quantization is dictated by extreme activation magnitudes, which inflate dynamic range and compress long-tail signals. We identify a counterintuitive source of this failure: dominant activation outliers are not merely arbitrary sparse events, but are largely induced by a coherent rank-one mean bias, whose direction aligns with the leading anisotropic spectral component. This mean component strengthens during training, is amplified and reshaped by attention and FFN operators, and increasingly dominates top activation magnitudes. Crucially, this discovery reveals that a seemingly complex outlier-suppression problem admits a truly simple solution: isolate the coherent mean before quantization. We therefore propose Averis, a mean-residual splitting quantization method that separates the mean component using only reductions and elementwise subtractions before FP4 quantization. Across Qwen3 0.6B Dense trained on 100B tokens and Qwen3 7B A1.5B MoE trained on 50B tokens, Averis enables robust W4A4G4 FP4 training, reducing BF16 loss gaps to 1.19%/0.81% versus 2.05%/1.10% for NVIDIA's recently released Hadamard-based outlier-smoothing method, while limiting downstream gaps to 0.89/0.71 points. With only 2.20% end-to-end overhead over vanilla NVFP4, about 30% of NVIDIA's Hadamard-based design, Averis provides a hardware-efficient path to stable low-bit LLM training. Complementary to Hadamard, Averis further reduces the Qwen3-0.6B loss and downstream gaps to 0.94% and 0.73 points when combined. Code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/averis-504D.

低比特训练量化LLMFP4

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