Lost in the bf16 Cast: Exporting Ternary Language Models Can Revert Most Low-Learning-Rate Code Changes

Excerpt

arXiv:2610.07853v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Ternary language models such as BitNet b1.58, Falcon-E and BitCPM are fine-tuned with higher-precision latent weights and deployed as ternary codes produced by an export step that, in the labs' documented pipelines, first casts the latents to bf16. We audit those pipelines across three labs. In released checkpoints, fp32 quantization of the shipped latents disagrees with the deployed codes on 0.83-1.77% of codes in Falcon-E and BitCPM and on 1.530%