Stochastic Rounding in Low-Precision Transformer Inference: A Variable-Precision Emulation Study of a Small GPT-2

Excerpt

arXiv:2610.01889v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Should low-precision transformer inference use stochastic rounding (SR) or round-to-nearest (RN)? The answer depends on where in the network you look. We isolate this effect by holding the numerical format fixed and varying only the rounding rule at individual operation sites. To enable experiments at freely chosen precisions, we extend the PRISM vectorized rounding library to arbitrary virtual precision via a variable-precision stochastic rounding