In plain words: Training uses 4-bit numbers for heavy math, rounding values randomly up or down so averages stay true, and first mixing them with a fixed rotation to tame outlier errors. Quality stays near full precision while computing corrections runs over 1.3 times faster than 8-bit training.
Abstract
Low precision (LP) datatypes such as MXFP4 can accelerate matrix multiplications (GEMMs) and reduce training costs. However, directly using MXFP4 instead of BF16 during training significantly degrades model quality. In this work, we present the first near-lossless training recipe that uses MXFP4 GEMMs, which are $2\times$ faster than FP8 on supported hardware. Our key insight is to compute unbiased gradient estimates with stochastic rounding (SR), resulting in more accurate model updates. However, directly applying SR to MXFP4 can result in high variance from block-level outliers, harming convergence. To overcome this, we use the random Hadamard tranform to theoretically bound the variance of SR. We train GPT models up to 6.7B parameters and find that our method induces minimal degradation over mixed-precision BF16 training. Our recipe computes $>1/2$ the training FLOPs in MXFP4, enabling an estimated speedup of $>1.3\times$ over FP8 and $>1.7\times$ over BF16 during backpropagation.
Albert Tseng, Tao Yu, Youngsuk Park
arXiv:2502.20586 · cs.LG · submitted Feb 27, 2025 · updated Aug 26, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · AISTATS 2025, block-scaled FP4 (MXFP4, NVFP4, etc.) training