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

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
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preprint

FourSight: Stable FP4 RL Post-Training via Sequence Filtering and Sparse Channel Compensation

Tianyuan Wu, Yinghao Yu, Yuechen Tao, Gu Gong et al.
arXiv (Cornell University)
Advanced Neural Network Applications
preprint

FourSight: Stable FP4 RL Post-Training via Sequence Filtering and Sparse Channel Compensation

Tianyuan Wu, Yinghao Yu, Yuechen Tao, Gu Gong, Xiaowen Chu, Wei Wang, Yining Wei
preprint en

Abstract

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.

arXiv (Cornell University)
Advanced Neural Network Applications
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