arXiv:2608.28113cs.CL2026-08

H-Scale优化低精度大模型推理中的分组缩放,提升精度且无推理开销。

H-Scale: Hessian-Guided Scale Refinement for NVFP4 Sub-Byte LLM Inference

  • 基于校准激活的二阶近似,直接优化层输出扰动
  • 在主流LLM上显著提升NVFP4基线性能,接近BF16基准
  • 轻量级后处理,可无缝嵌入现有量化流程

NVIDIA Blackwell架构原生支持超细粒度的NVFP4格式,为大语言模型(LLM)推理加速带来新机遇。NVFP4的微块设计(如16个元素一组)能灵活捕捉权重局部分布并隔离异常值,但也引入了大量且高度敏感的分组缩放因子空间。现有后训练量化(PTQ)方法主要关注量化权重值的优化,对缩放因子选择这一关键步骤研究不足。为此,我们提出H-Scale,一种针对NVFP4分组缩放因子优化的轻量级后处理方法。与传统最小化权重重建误差不同,H-Scale利用校准激活计算的对角二阶代理,选取硬件有效的分组缩放因子,更直接地控制层输出扰动。该方法可作为各类NVFP4流水线中RTN风格缩放选择的即插即用替代方案,仅需少量离线校准,推理时零开销。在固定评估协议下,对主流LLM的实验表明,H-Scale普遍提升多种NVFP4基线表现,并使多个变体逼近BF16参考精度。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

The NVIDIA Blackwell architecture, with native support for the ultra-fine-grained NVFP4 format, opens new opportunities for accelerating large language model (LLM) inference. NVFP4's micro-block design, such as a group size of 16, offers strong representational flexibility for capturing local weight distributions and isolating outliers, but it also introduces a large and highly sensitive space of per-group scaling factors. Existing post-training quantization (PTQ) methods primarily focus on refining quantized weight values, leaving this scale-selection step underexplored. To address this gap, we propose \textbf{H-Scale}, a lightweight post-processing method for NVFP4 per-group scale refinement. Instead of minimizing plain weight reconstruction error, H-Scale selects hardware-valid group scales using a diagonal second-order proxy derived from calibration activations, thereby targeting layer output perturbation more directly. It is designed as a drop-in replacement for RTN-style scale selection in diverse NVFP4 pipelines, requires only modest offline calibration, and introduces strictly zero overhead at inference time. Under a fixed evaluation protocol, experiments on mainstream LLMs show that H-Scale generally improves a broad range of NVFP4 baselines and brings several variants closer to the BF16 reference.

低精度推理量化NVFP4缩放优化

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