Doug Burger

Qingyun Wu, Gagan Bansal, Jieyu Zhang et al. · uw

AutoGen is an open-source framework that allows developers to build LLM applications via multiple agents that can converse with each other to accomplish tasks. AutoGen agents are customizable, conversable, and can operate in various modes that employ combinations of LLMs, human inputs, and tools. Using AutoGen, developers can also flexibly define agent interaction behaviors. Both natural language and computer code can be used to program flexible conversation patterns for different applications. AutoGen serves as a generic infrastructure to build diverse applications of various complexities and LLM capacities. Empirical studies demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework in many example applications, with domains ranging from mathematics, coding, question answering, operations research, online decision-making, entertainment, etc.

Bita Rouhani, Ritchie Zhao, Venmugil Elango et al.

This paper introduces Block Data Representations (BDR), a framework for exploring and evaluating a wide spectrum of narrow-precision formats for deep learning. It enables comparison of popular quantization standards, and through BDR, new formats based on shared microexponents (MX) are identified, which outperform other state-of-the-art quantization approaches, including narrow-precision floating-point and block floating-point. MX utilizes multiple levels of quantization scaling with ultra-fine scaling factors based on shared microexponents in the hardware. The effectiveness of MX is demonstrated on real-world models including large-scale generative pretraining and inferencing, and production-scale recommendation systems.

Bita Darvish Rouhani, Ritchie Zhao, Ankit More et al.

Narrow bit-width data formats are key to reducing the computational and storage costs of modern deep learning applications. This paper evaluates Microscaling (MX) data formats that combine a per-block scaling factor with narrow floating-point and integer types for individual elements. MX formats balance the competing needs of hardware efficiency, model accuracy, and user friction. Empirical results on over two dozen benchmarks demonstrate practicality of MX data formats as a drop-in replacement for baseline FP32 for AI inference and training with low user friction. We also show the first instance of training generative language models at sub-8-bit weights, activations, and gradients with minimal accuracy loss and no modifications to the training recipe.