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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Liu, Taowen, Andronic, Marta, Gündüz, Deniz, Constantinides, George A.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00874
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Table of Contents:
  • LLM training is resource-intensive. Quantized training improves computational and memory efficiency but introduces quantization noise, which can hinder convergence and degrade model accuracy. Stochastic Rounding (SR) has emerged as a theoretically attractive alternative to deterministic rounding, offering unbiased gradient estimates. However, its interaction with other training factors -- especially batch size -- remains under explored. In this paper, we present a theoretical and empirical study of mini-batch stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with SR, showing that increased batch sizes can compensate for reduced precision during back-propagation. Furthermore, we show that quantizing weights and activations impacts gradient variance in distinct ways. Our experiments validate these theoretical insights.