In plain words: By doing attention math in 4-bit numbers on new NVIDIA chips' dedicated units, this speeds up the step that slows long-context AI. It ran 5 times faster than the fastest prior attention code; an 8-bit version kept fine-tuning quality but learned slower from scratch.
Abstract · SageAttention3: Microscaling FP4 Attention for Inference and An Exploration of 8-Bit Training
The efficiency of attention is important due to its quadratic time complexity. We enhance the efficiency of attention through two key contributions: First, we leverage the new FP4 Tensor Cores in Blackwell GPUs to accelerate attention computation. Our implementation achieves 1038 TOPS on RTX5090, which is a 5x speedup over the fastest FlashAttention on RTX5090. Experiments show that our FP4 attention can accelerate inference of various models in a plug-and-play way. Second, we pioneer low-bit attention to training tasks. Existing low-bit attention works like FlashAttention3 and SageAttention focus only on inference. However, the efficiency of training large models is also important. To explore whether low-bit attention can be effectively applied to training tasks, we design an accurate and efficient 8-bit attention for both forward and backward propagation. Experiments indicate that 8-bit attention achieves lossless performance in fine-tuning tasks but exhibits slower convergence in pretraining tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/thu-ml/SageAttention.
Jintao Zhang, Jia Wei, Pengle Zhang, Xiaoming Xu, Haofeng Huang, Haoxu Wang, Kai Jiang, Jianfei Chen, Jun Zhu
arXiv:2505.11594 · cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.AR, cs.CV, cs.PF · submitted May 16, 2025 · updated Jan 14, 2026
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