Unveiling the Potential of Quantization with MXFP4: Strategies for Quantization Error Reduction

Researchers have developed two software techniques (OAS and MBS) that dramatically improve MXFP4 quantization accuracy for Large Language Models, reducing the performance gap with NVIDIA's NVFP4 from 10% to below 1%. This breakthrough makes MXFP4 a viable alternative while maintaining 12% hardware efficiency advantages in tensor cores.