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About this paper
Jungi Lee, Junyong Park, Soohyun Cha, Jaehoon Cho, Jaewoong Sim
An extension to Microscaling (MX) formats, MX+ by Seoul National University, enhances Large Language Model (LLM) serving efficiency by non-intrusively addressing outlier values in ultra-low-bit activation tensors. This method yields substantial model accuracy improvements, with MXFP4+ achieving up to a 42.15% increase over standard MXFP4 on LLM benchmarks, making practical 4-bit LLM inference viable.
Key insights
- Outlier values in LLM activation tensors are the critical bottleneck causing severe performance degradation in ultra-low-bit MX formats.
- The Block Max (BM) element, which defines the block's scale, is a natural and easily identifiable target for specific precision enhancement.
- Repurposing redundant bit fields within the MX format allows for a non-intrusive increase in outlier precision without altering the overall bit width per element.
Summary by alphaXiv.
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