{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/sageattention3-microscaling-fp4-attention-for","title":"SageAttention3: Microscaling FP4 Attention for Inference and An Exploration of 8-Bit Training","arxiv_id":"2505.11594","date":"2025-05-16","proceeding":null,"authors":["Jintao Zhang","Jia Wei","Pengle Zhang","Xiaoming Xu","Haofeng Huang","Haoxu Wang","Kai Jiang","Jun Zhu","Jianfei Chen"],"abstract":"The efficiency of attention is important due to its quadratic time complexity. We enhance the efficiency of attention through two key contributions: First, we leverage the new FP4 Tensor Cores in Blackwell GPUs to accelerate attention computation. Our implementation achieves 1038 TOPS on RTX5090, which is a 5x speedup over the fastest FlashAttention on RTX5090. Experiments show that our FP4 attention can accelerate inference of various models in a plug-and-play way. Second, we pioneer low-bit attention to training tasks. Existing low-bit attention works like FlashAttention3 and SageAttention focus only on inference. However, the efficiency of training large models is also important. To explore whether low-bit attention can be effectively applied to training tasks, we design an accurate and efficient 8-bit attention for both forward and backward propagation. Experiments indicate that 8-bit attention achieves lossless performance in fine-tuning tasks but exhibits slower convergence in pretraining tasks. The code will be available at https://github.com/thu-ml/SageAttention.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.11594v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.11594v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"sageattention3-microscaling-fp4-attention-for","repo_url":"https://github.com/thu-ml/SageAttention","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"focus","method_name":"Focus"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2505.11594","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2505.11594","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2505.11594"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-25T09:33:49+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/thu-ml/SageAttention","reach":null}],"summary":{"unverified":3},"by_repo_kind":{},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":3,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"0d53f0eb082706d1","entry":"sageattn","repo":null,"repo_kind":null,"path":null,"file_url":null,"link_basis":"identical_code_first_harvested_elsewhere","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":null,"inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"0d53f0eb082706d1"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"b342df7dc419a801","entry":"sageattn_qk_int8_pv_fp16_triton","repo":null,"repo_kind":null,"path":null,"file_url":null,"link_basis":"identical_code_first_harvested_elsewhere","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":null,"inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"b342df7dc419a801"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"c9ff307a043756a1","entry":"sageattn_varlen","repo":null,"repo_kind":null,"path":null,"file_url":null,"link_basis":"identical_code_first_harvested_elsewhere","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":null,"inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"c9ff307a043756a1"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}