H-Scale: Hessian-Guided Scale Refinement for NVFP4 Sub-Byte LLM Inference

Abstract:The NVIDIA Blackwell architecture, with native support for the ultra-fine-grained NVFP4 format, opens new opportunities for accelerating large language model (LLM) inference. NVFP4's micro-block design, such as a group size of 16, offers strong representational flexibility for capturing local weight distributions and isolating outliers, but it also introduces a large and highly sensitive space of per-group scaling factors. Existing post-training quantization (PTQ) methods primarily focus on refining quantized weight values, leaving this scale-selection step underexplored. To address this gap, we propose \textbf{H-Scale}, a lightweight post-processing method for NVFP4 per-group scale refinement. Instead of minimizing plain weight reconstruction error, H-Scale selects hardware-valid group scales using a diagonal second-order proxy derived from calibration activations, thereby targeting layer output perturbation more directly. It is designed as a drop-in replacement for RTN-style scale selection in diverse NVFP4 pipelines, requires only modest offline calibration, and introduces strictly zero overhead at inference time. Under a fixed evaluation protocol, experiments on mainstream LLMs show that H-Scale generally improves a broad range of NVFP4 baselines and brings several variants closer to the BF16 reference.

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2608.28113 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2608.28113v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.28113 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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