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[Draft]feat: add NVFP4 QAT (Quantization-Aware Training) support for verl FS…#5190

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[Draft]feat: add NVFP4 QAT (Quantization-Aware Training) support for verl FS…#5190
zhangyimi wants to merge 3 commits intoverl-project:mainfrom
zhangyimi:qat

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@zhangyimi zhangyimi commented Feb 3, 2026

Description

This PR adds support for NVFP4 Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) with FSDP, enabling W4A16 (weight-only) quantization during RL training.

What's included

verl/utils/qat/ module: QATLinear (Triton FP4 fake quantization), scale fusion, NVFP4 quantizer, and vLLM dynamic weight loading patches
Recipe scripts and configs for Qwen3-30B-A3B W4A16 (full quantization & FFN-only quantization)
Detailed README with implementation overview and experimental results

Key Results

Validated on Qwen3-8B-Base (Dense) and Qwen3-30B-A3B-Base (MoE): W4A16 QAT achieves training accuracy on par with BF16 baseline, while without QAT the KL divergence explodes and training crashes.
70.3% weight memory reduction on Qwen3-30B-A3B during rollout (56.88 GiB → 16.89 GiB), freeing ~40 GiB for additional KV Cache capacity.

verl-recipe PR:verl-project/verl-recipe#36
README: https://github.com/zhangyimi/verl-recipe/blob/dfbf09cd66c66ecbc4b9cea925a6885e5e53f2b1/qat/README.md

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…DP training

This PR adds support for NVFP4 Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) with FSDP,
enabling W4A16 (weight-only) quantization during RL training.

Key features:
- QATConfig: Unified configuration for QAT in actor.qat
- QATLinear: Fake quantized linear layer with Triton kernels for FP4 quantization
- QATQuantizer: Fast quantization for weight sync to vLLM rollout
- vLLM patches: Dynamic weight loading support for NVFP4 (Dense and MoE)
- Scale fusion: Automatic QKV/GateUp scale fusion for training-inference consistency

Usage:
  actor:
    qat:
      enable: true
      mode: w4a16
      quantization_config_path: path/to/nvfp4_config.json
@zhangyimi zhangyimi force-pushed the qat branch 6 times, most recently from 67c87d2 to 1d0c7f3 Compare February 6, 2026 12:28
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2 participants