FourSight: Stable FP4 RL Post-Training via Sequence Filtering and Sparse Channel Compensation
Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training increasingly targets low-bit deployment, with NVFP4 weight-and activation quantization (W4A4) becoming the state-of-the-practice format. However, integrating NVFP4 into RL degrades rollout quality and amplifies cross-engine training-inference mismatch (TIM), destabilizing training. We show that these failures are concentrated rather than uniform - severely mismatched tail tokens concentrate in a few outlier sequences, while policy weights remain largely intact and quantization error concentrates in a few high-variance activation channels. Guided by this, we present FourSight, an algorithm-system co-design with two targeted solutions: TIM-aware sequence filtering that excludes drifted trajectories from policy updates, and sparse precision compensation that keeps only top-variance channels in BF16 while retaining native NVFP4 elsewhere. We further design a fused SpliceGEMM kernel with specialized prefill and decode datapaths to minimize overhead. FourSight sustains near-BF16 accuracy and strong FP4 deployment quality across models and engines, while improving step-to-accuracy by 1.76-2.60x and staying within 2.3% of FP4 step time up to 120B-scale models.
Authors
- Tianyuan Wu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0000-0974-6843)
- Yinghao Yu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2744-845X)
- Yuechen Tao (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0650-3608)
- Gu Gong (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2025-5444)
- Xiaowen Chu
- Wei Wang
- Yining Wei
Publication Details
- Journal
- arXiv (Cornell University)
- Published
- 2026-11-03
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2611.04887
- Primary Topic
- Advanced Neural Network Applications
- Type
- preprint