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Unleashing Low-Bit Inference on Ascend NPUs: A Comprehensive Evaluation of HiFloat Formats

Pengxiang Zhao, Hui-Ling Zhen, Xing Li, Han Bao, Weizhe Lin, Zhiyuan Yang, Manyi Zhang, Yuanyong Luo, Ziwei Yu, Xin Wang, Mingxuan Yuan, Xianzhi Yu, Zhenhua Dong · Feb 13, 2026 · Citations: 0

Automatic Metrics
Open arXiv Find Implementation RSS feed Shortlist (0)

How to use this page

Low trust

Use this as background context only. Do not make protocol decisions from this page alone.

Best use

Background context only

What to verify

Validate the evaluation procedure and quality controls in the full paper before operational use.

Evidence quality

Low

Derived from extracted protocol signals and abstract evidence.

Abstract

As LLMs scale, low-bit floating-point formats like MXFP and NVFP4 offer new opportunities for precision and efficiency. In this work, we evaluate HiFloat (HiF8 and HiF4), a family of formats tailored for Ascend NPUs. Through rigorous comparison across weight-activation and KV-cache tasks, we provide three key insights: (1) INT8 suits narrow-range data, while floating-point formats excel with high-variance data; (2) in 4-bit regimes, HiF4's hierarchical scaling prevents the accuracy collapse seen in integer formats; and (3) HiFloat is fully compatible with state-of-the-art post-training quantization frameworks. Overall, HiFloat provides a solution for high-efficiency LLM inference on NPUs.

Abstract-only analysis — low confidence

All signals on this page are inferred from the abstract only and may be inaccurate. Do not use this page as a primary protocol reference.

  • This paper looks adjacent to evaluation work, but not like a strong protocol reference.
  • The available metadata is too thin to trust this as a primary source.
Human Eval Hub LLM-as-Judge Hub Pairwise Preference Hub

Should You Rely On This Paper?

This paper is adjacent to HFEPX scope and is best used for background context, not as a primary protocol reference.

Best use

Background context only

Use if you need

A secondary eval reference to pair with stronger protocol papers.

Main weakness

This paper looks adjacent to evaluation work, but not like a strong protocol reference.

Trust level

Low

Usefulness score

0/100 • Low

Treat as adjacent context, not a core eval-method reference.

Human Feedback Signal

Not explicit in abstract metadata

Evaluation Signal

Detected

Usefulness for eval research

Adjacent candidate

Extraction confidence 35%

If you are doing eval pipeline work, start here:

Human Eval Hub LLM-as-Judge Hub Pairwise Preference Hub Tool-Use Eval Hub

What We Could Verify

These are the protocol signals we could actually recover from the available paper metadata. Use them to decide whether this paper is worth deeper reading.

Human Feedback Types

missing

None explicit

No explicit feedback protocol extracted.

"As LLMs scale, low-bit floating-point formats like MXFP and NVFP4 offer new opportunities for precision and efficiency."

Evaluation Modes

partial

Automatic Metrics

Includes extracted eval setup.

"As LLMs scale, low-bit floating-point formats like MXFP and NVFP4 offer new opportunities for precision and efficiency."

Quality Controls

missing

Not reported

No explicit QC controls found.

"As LLMs scale, low-bit floating-point formats like MXFP and NVFP4 offer new opportunities for precision and efficiency."

Benchmarks / Datasets

missing

Not extracted

No benchmark anchors detected.

"As LLMs scale, low-bit floating-point formats like MXFP and NVFP4 offer new opportunities for precision and efficiency."

Reported Metrics

partial

Accuracy, Precision

Useful for evaluation criteria comparison.

"As LLMs scale, low-bit floating-point formats like MXFP and NVFP4 offer new opportunities for precision and efficiency."

Human Feedback Details

  • Uses human feedback: No
  • Feedback types: None
  • Rater population: Not reported
  • Expertise required: General

Evaluation Details

  • Evaluation modes: Automatic Metrics
  • Agentic eval: None
  • Quality controls: Not reported
  • Evidence quality: Low
  • Use this page as: Background context only

Protocol And Measurement Signals

Benchmarks / Datasets

No benchmark or dataset names were extracted from the available abstract.

Reported Metrics

accuracyprecision

Research Brief

Metadata summary

As LLMs scale, low-bit floating-point formats like MXFP and NVFP4 offer new opportunities for precision and efficiency.

Based on abstract + metadata only. Check the source paper before making high-confidence protocol decisions.

Key Takeaways

  • As LLMs scale, low-bit floating-point formats like MXFP and NVFP4 offer new opportunities for precision and efficiency.
  • In this work, we evaluate HiFloat (HiF8 and HiF4), a family of formats tailored for Ascend NPUs.
  • Through rigorous comparison across weight-activation and KV-cache tasks, we provide three key insights: (1) INT8 suits narrow-range data, while floating-point formats excel with high-variance data; (2) in 4-bit regimes, HiF4's hierarchical scaling prevents the accuracy collapse seen in integer formats; and (3) HiFloat is fully compatible with state-of-the-art post-training quantization frameworks.

Researcher Actions

  • Compare this paper against nearby papers in the same arXiv category before using it for protocol decisions.
  • Validate inferred eval signals (Automatic metrics) against the full paper.
  • Use related-paper links to find stronger protocol-specific references.

Caveats

  • Generated from abstract + metadata only; no PDF parsing.
  • Signals below are heuristic and may miss details reported outside the abstract.

Recommended Queries

Accuracy

Research Summary

Contribution Summary

  • In this work, we evaluate HiFloat (HiF8 and HiF4), a family of formats tailored for Ascend NPUs.
  • Through rigorous comparison across weight-activation and KV-cache tasks, we provide three key insights: (1) INT8 suits narrow-range data, while floating-point formats excel with high-variance data; (2) in 4-bit regimes, HiF4's hierarchical…

Why It Matters For Eval

  • Abstract shows limited direct human-feedback or evaluation-protocol detail; use as adjacent methodological context.

Researcher Checklist

  • Gap: Human feedback protocol is explicit

    No explicit human feedback protocol detected.

  • Pass: Evaluation mode is explicit

    Detected: Automatic Metrics

  • Gap: Quality control reporting appears

    No calibration/adjudication/IAA control explicitly detected.

  • Gap: Benchmark or dataset anchors are present

    No benchmark/dataset anchor extracted from abstract.

  • Pass: Metric reporting is present

    Detected: accuracy, precision

Related Papers

Papers are ranked by protocol overlap, extraction signal alignment, and semantic proximity.

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