README.md

metadata

license: apache-2.0

Voxtral-Mini-4B-Realtime-2602 — FP8 (W8A8 dynamic)

FP8-quantized submission for the Audio-to-Text track, built on mistralai/Voxtral-Mini-4B-Realtime-2602 (the base model remains the primary model in inference; this is post-training quantization only, no finetuning).

Approach

Weights are quantized to FP8 E4M3, W8A8 dynamic using the compressed-tensors format:

• Static, per-output-channel weight scales (scale = absmax_channel / 448).
• Dynamic, per-token activation quantization, computed by vLLM at runtime (no activation scales stored).

This targets the L4's native FP8 matmul (Ada, SM 8.9), giving real compute and memory-bandwidth energy savings — not just a smaller disk footprint.

Quantization is applied directly to the Mistral-native consolidated.safetensors, preserving native key names so vLLM's purpose-built realtime Voxtral loader serves it (--config-format mistral --load-format mistral). No HuggingFace save_pretrained round-trip is used, which would rename submodules and break the native loader.

What is quantized

• Decoder attention projections (wq/wk/wv/wo) and MLP (w1/w2/w3) for all 26 decoder layers.
• (If the encoder variant was used) the streaming Whisper encoder's transformer attention + MLP Linear weights — the encoder runs on every audio chunk, so this is the dominant inference-energy term for realtime ASR.

What stays BF16

• All norms (attention_norm, ffn_norm, top-level norm).
• The adaptive-norm conditioning MLP ada_rms_norm_t_cond.{0,2} (Linear-shaped, accuracy-sensitive, negligible compute).
• Conv stem and all biases.
• The audio↔language connector (audio_language_projection).
• Tied token embeddings / lm_head.

Serving config

See vllm_config.yaml. Key choices:

• tokenizer_mode/config_format/load_format: mistral — required for the native Voxtral realtime path and the bundled tekken.json tokenizer.
• compilation_config: '{"cudagraph_mode":"PIECEWISE"}' and no enforce_eager — enables torch.compile + CUDA graphs, a large energy win within the enforced time budget.
• max_model_len left high enough not to truncate eval clips (the FAQ notes too-low values hurt benchmark scores); lower only if clips are confirmed short.
• No infra-specific params (no tensor-parallel-size / swap_space / logging flags).

Reproduce

pip install torch safetensors
python quantize_voxtral_native_fp8.py \
  --src-dir <dir with consolidated.safetensors> \
  --save-dir ./Voxtral-FP8\
  [--quantize-encoder]

Known issues / notes for the eval team

• Built and validated against vLLM 0.23.0.
• If load fails on a per-channel scale shape, the weight scale is stored as [out, 1] float32; the build may expect [out] — squeeze the trailing dim.
• pip freeze for the build environment is included for debugging.

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