In plain words: Switching a model's number format changes its answers, since tiny rounding flips a near-tied top word. Outputs split on 49-100% of prompts; redoing the final step in higher precision when the top two are close raised agreement 22-36 points at under 4% extra time.
Abstract · Greedy Decoding Is Not Precision-Invariant: Cross-Precision Output Divergence in LLM Inference
Greedy decoding from large language models is commonly treated as deterministic. We show it is not precision-invariant: the same model, prompt, and decoding algorithm produce different outputs in BF16 versus FP16 on identical hardware. Across our evaluations of six models (1.1B-7B parameters, four families; divergence additionally characterised at 12B) and three benchmarks, 49-100\% of prompts diverge; a single token flip often cascades into trajectory-level divergence. We develop an empirical error-propagation analysis and find that 22 layers of accumulated body error do not distinguish flipping from non-flipping steps; the outcome depends primarily on the top-two logit margin at the LM head relative to the directional perturbation between the top-two candidates. The analysis makes five testable predictions about intervention outcomes, including that applying more FP32 compute (broader scope) makes agreement worse. The experiments match all five predictions. The best-performing low-overhead intervention we evaluate, selective FP32 LM head recomputation, triggered only when the margin falls below a threshold, delivers +22-36 pp exact agreement on A10G (+12-21 pp on L4 and A100) at less than 4\% latency overhead in low-batch (batch size <=4) single-stream inference. We map the applicability boundary across six models and four batch sizes, and hypothesise that training-time precision stability is a determining factor. The method is a partial mitigation rather than a universal determinism guarantee: its benefit vanishes when body-originated error dominates, including at batch size >=8 and under end-to-end FP8 in our tests.
Gaoyuan Du, Anam Nawaz Khan, Rex Zhou, Xiaoyang Liu, Deepayan Chakrabarti, Fnu Suya, Xueping Li
arXiv:2609.26621 · cs.LG, cs.AI · submitted Sep 22, 2026
abstract · pdf · Accepted by Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR), 2026