重新审视LLM FP4预训练中的收缩偏差:几何起源、系统性影响与UFP4方案
当前FP4硬件路径(如NVIDIA Blackwell/Rubin-class及AMD MI350系列)均基于E2M1格式,但其可表示bin的几何不对称导致系统性负舍入误差——收缩偏差(Shrinkage Bias),该偏差在层间累积并被随机Hadamard变换(RHT)放大,解释了E2M1 FP4训练不稳定的原因。均匀网格E1M2/INT4避免了此误差并提升了量化质量。据此提出UFP4方案,对三个训练GEMM应用RHT并将随机舍入限制在dY。在Dense 1.5B、MoE 7.9B和MoE 124B长程预训练中,UFP4持续低于强E2M1基线的BF16相对损失退化。未来加速器应将E1M2/INT4风格均匀4-bit网格作为一等训练基元。
FP4 training promises substantial reductions in memory and computation cost for LLM pretraining, yet current FP4 hardware paths and recipes, including NVIDIA Blackwell/Rubin-class systems and AMD MI350-series GPUs, remain centered on E2M1 data elements. In this study, we identify a fundamental limitation of that choice: non-uniform formats such as E2M1 inherently suffer from Shrinkage Bias, a systematic negative rounding error caused by the geometric asymmetry of their representable bins. We show that this bias accumulates multiplicatively across layers and is amplified by the Random Hadamard Transform (RHT), providing a unified explanation for the training instability observed in existing E2M1-based FP4 recipes. In contrast, uniform grids (E1M2/INT4) bypass this grid-geometry error and better convert the improved bucket utilization from RHT into higher quantization quality. Based on this finding, we propose UFP4, a uniform 4-bit training recipe that applies RHT to all three training GEMMs while restricting stochastic rounding to dY alone. On Dense 1.5B, MoE 7.9B, and MoE 124B long-run pretraining, UFP4 consistently achieves lower BF16-relative loss degradation than strong E2M1-based baselines, supported by scaling-law analysis and ablation studies. Our results suggest that future accelerators should support E1M2/INT4-style uniform 4-bit grids as first-class training primitives alongside E2M1.