Training methods
media Hugging Face Forums · 3d ago

Small-scale debug comparison of OLMo-core with Engram graft

A 200-step training comparison between a base OLMo3 600M model and a version with a DeepSeek-style Engram graft shows lower training and evaluation loss, faster grad-norm stabilization, and improved early learning behavior. The Engram graft, injected into layers 1 and 5, increases trainable parameters to ~1.7B but maintains only a 40k increase in active parameters per token, indicating efficient memory usage.

media r/LocalLLaMA · 5d ago

Fixing Long-Context Decode Cliff on Radeon R9700 with vLLM 0.22.1

A long-context decode performance cliff on AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 (RDNA4) was resolved by enabling AITER Unified Attention in vLLM 0.22.1. The fix involves relaxing a CDNA gate to include RDNA4, disabling other attention backends, and using bf16 KV cache, resulting in significant speedups across all context lengths. FP8 KV is ineffective on this hardware, and the model's native 262K context is fully achievable with bf16, offering ~2.9× concurrency without needing FP8.

arxiv arXiv cs.AI · 6d ago

UFP4: Uniform 4-Bit Training Overcomes Shrinkage Bias in LLM Pretraining

A study identifies shrinkage bias in E2M1-based FP4 formats due to geometric asymmetry, causing multiplicative error accumulation and training instability. The proposed UFP4 recipe uses uniform E1M2/INT4 grids and applies Random Hadamard Transform to all GEMMs, achieving lower loss degradation than E2M1 baselines in large-scale LLM pretraining. The authors recommend E1M2/INT4 as a first-class training primitive for future accelerators.

arxiv arXiv cs.AI · 6d ago

UltraQuant: 4-bit KV Caching for Context-Heavy Agents

UltraQuant enables 4-bit KV caching for context-heavy agents, reducing P50 time-to-first-token by 3.47x in late rounds and boosting output throughput by 1.63x over FP8 KV baseline. It achieves this using FP8 queries, FP4 KV tensors, UE8M0 group scales, and native scaled-MFMA on AMD CDNA4 GPUs, with optimizations for decode-attention kernels and robust design choices like asymmetric K/V treatment and Walsh-Hadamard rotation.