AtomicChat/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-NVFP4-nvidia

DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-NVFP4

deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash with its routed experts re-encoded as NVFP4 by NVIDIA's DeepSeek-V4 ModelOpt recipe, calibrated, and measured against the original on the same engine and GPUs. Produced by one run of foundry-nvfp4.sh on 4×B200, 2026-09-10. Every log, the raw top-512 log-probability dumps of all ten measurement runs, the calibration amax and the aggregation script are in AtomicChat/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-NVFP4-metrics.

What this is, and what it is not

V4.1-Flash already ships its routed experts in MXFP4. NVFP4 keeps every E2M1 nibble and rewrites the block scales (E4M3 per 16 plus one fp32 per tensor, instead of E8M0 per 32). ModelOpt's --cast_mxfp4_to_nvfp4 does this in closed form; all 16,986,931,200 expert blocks had scales inside the exactly representable window. We then checked the result the direct way: 12 experts × 3 projections (0.42 G parameters) dequantized from the source and from this checkpoint and compared element by element: identical, worst difference 0.0. The packed bytes differ in 11 % of positions, every one of them a −0 nibble that the export normalized to +0. Script and report: logs/cast-check.py and logs/cast-check.txt in the metrics dataset.

Engram tables, attention, shared experts, the LM head and the MTP/DSpark draft stay in their original FP8 / BF16. The checkpoint is 17.00 GB (15.83 GiB) larger than the original: 527.29 GB against 510.30 GB, because the expert scales double. Nothing here is smaller. What NVFP4 buys is the W4A4 tensor-core path on Blackwell; what it costs is measured below. Speed was not measured and is not claimed.

Calibration, per NVIDIA's recipe: cnn_dailymail + nvidia/Nemotron-Post-Training-Dataset-v2, 64 samples of 512 tokens each, through DeepSeek's reference inference/model.py under NVIDIA Model-Optimizer at commit 079078de with two one-line patches for V4.1 (tokenizer into the Transformer, FP8 block size read from the scale shape). 15,246 of 15,360 routed experts (99.3 %) received calibration tokens; 342 expert projections took the exporter's fallback scale, the maximum over all calibrated experts of the same projection across layers. The only thing the calibration changes is input_scale, one fp32 per expert projection, which places the E4M3 window for the FP4 activations on Blackwell's NVFP4 MoE kernels.

Measured against the original

Reference: the original MXFP4 checkpoint served by the same vLLM build (dsv41-feat at e47aa780, PR #56214) on the same 4×B200, tensor parallel 4. The original takes the FlashInfer TRT-LLM MXFP4×MXFP8 MoE path; this checkpoint takes the FlashInfer TRT-LLM NVFP4 path. The difference measured below is the difference between those two execution paths as a whole, not an isolated cost of FP4 activations.

Protocol: three corpora from AtomicChat/calib-corpora, hashes as used in logs/corpora-sha256.txt: neutral (30 languages), code, and agentic, which is agentic dialogue rendered in Muse Glimmer's markup (<|start|>, atem:function_calls), not DeepSeek's DSML; V4.1's tokenizer scores it as plain text with unfamiliar control strings, which is fine for comparing builds on identical input and is not "the model's own markup". The corpora are disjoint from every calib-corpora build by construction; overlap with the CNN/DailyMail and Nemotron samples the recipe calibrates on was not checked. Windows of 4096 tokens starting with BOS, the second half of each window scored, 24 windows per corpus, 49,152 scored positions each, raw token ids in, no chat template, no speculative decoding. Teacher-forced next-token distributions only: this says nothing about tool calls or long free trajectories.

KL is a lower bound. vLLM returns top-512 log probabilities. The reference's top-512 ids that every compared run also ranked form the set S (median mass 1.00000, first percentile above 0.993); p and q are exact on S and everything else is one bucket on both sides. Coarsening onto a common partition can only lower the KL, so the number is at or below the true divergence, and no upper bound is claimed. Intervals are 95 % bootstrap over windows of 2048 positions and, in the paired table, also over each build's runs, resampled independently with the reference fixed; with three runs per build that is coarse, and it is the interval to quote.

Runs: three of this checkpoint, three of the uncalibrated cast (flat: same bits, input_scale = 1.0, which is what the community NVFP4 versions carry), two repeats of the original plus one with batch size 1. Each run is a fresh engine start.

Reference perplexity: 2.9685 (neutral), 1.8919 (code), 1.3861 (agentic).

corpus	build	runs	KL lower bound, mean of runs (run SD)	top-1 agreement (run SD)	ppl	Δ ppl
neutral	this checkpoint	3	0.03548 (0.00020)	94.10 % (0.05)	2.9938	+0.85 %
	uncalibrated cast	3	0.03459 (0.00040)	94.29 % (0.10)	2.9901	+0.73 %
	original, repeated	2	0.01596 (0.00013)	96.13 % (0.08)	2.9689	+0.01 %
	original, batch 1	1	0.01676	95.90 %	2.9645	−0.13 %
code	this checkpoint	3	0.02008 (0.00031)	96.65 % (0.09)	1.8991	+0.38 %
	uncalibrated cast	3	0.01942 (0.00060)	96.77 % (0.06)	1.8995	+0.40 %
	original, repeated	2	0.01022 (0.00017)	97.69 % (0.00)	1.8907	−0.06 %
	original, batch 1	1	0.01108	97.55 %	1.8922	+0.02 %
agentic	this checkpoint	3	0.00888 (0.00011)	98.34 % (0.05)	1.3873	+0.09 %
	uncalibrated cast	3	0.00856 (0.00019)	98.37 % (0.04)	1.3875	+0.10 %
	original, repeated	2	0.00537 (0.00020)	98.67 % (0.05)	1.3856	−0.04 %
	original, batch 1	1	0.00585	98.65 %	1.3863	+0.02 %

Paired differences, A − B, 95 % bootstrap over windows and runs (windows-only intervals, which are narrower, are in logs/aggregate.txt):

corpus	this checkpoint − cast, KL	this checkpoint − cast, top-1	cast − original, KL	cast − original, top-1
neutral	+0.0009 [+0.0001, +0.0019]	−0.19 pt [−0.41, +0.03]	+0.0186 [+0.0159, +0.0217]	−1.84 pt [−2.11, −1.59]
code	+0.0007 [−0.0002, +0.0015]	−0.12 pt [−0.29, +0.04]	+0.0092 [+0.0061, +0.0125]	−0.92 pt [−1.29, −0.58]
agentic	+0.0003 [−0.0001, +0.0008]	−0.02 pt [−0.13, +0.09]	+0.0032 [+0.0025, +0.0040]	−0.30 pt [−0.40, −0.20]

Three readings:

1. The calibration showed no convincing advantage in this experiment. The point estimates lean the other way: the calibrated checkpoint sits 0.0009 KL and 0.19 points of top-1 behind the uncalibrated cast on neutral, but once run-to-run variation is in the interval only the neutral KL difference stays clear of zero, and barely; top-1 on every corpus and KL on code and agentic do not, and code perplexity is marginally lower for the calibrated build (1.8991 against 1.8995). The defensible statement: no measurable benefit from the calibration on this model, and a slight lean toward the plain cast that three runs cannot confirm. A mechanism consistent with the lean, and predicted before measuring, is that DeepSeek trained V4.1 with clamped SwiGLU activations (expert inputs bounded at 189 and 150), a flat E4M3 window already covers that range, and a per-expert ceiling set from a few hundred calibration tokens can only clip what it did not see. That remains a hypothesis: no clipping was observed, and a changed scale also moves the rounding of every value, so nothing here shows input_scale = 1.0 to be optimal. We publish the calibrated build because it is the recipe; the cast is the same bits with input_scale = 1.0.
2. The NVFP4 path costs 1.8 points of top-1 agreement and +0.7 to +0.9 % perplexity on general text, about half that on code, a tenth on agentic dialogue, relative to the original on its native path. This is separated from the original's own run-to-run spread on every corpus, with either interval.
3. Two runs of the original diverge from each other by 0.016 KL and disagree on 4 % of top-1 tokens, yet a build's mean divergence is stable to 0.0002–0.0006 across runs. One batch-size-1 run of the original diverged from the batch-4 reference about as much as the batch-4 repeats did, which argues against batching as the source without settling it. Non-deterministic MoE kernels flipping near-tied experts is the working hypothesis, not an established cause.

Running it

Needs Blackwell (B200/B300/GB200/GB300, or RTX PRO 6000 via the CUTLASS backends) and a vLLM that knows deepseek_v41: as of 2026-09-10 that is the branch above, built from source. The loader keys on moe_quant_algo: NVFP4 in config.json. Measured with tensor_parallel_size=4, max_model_len=4097, no speculative decoding; the DSpark draft experts are left in MXFP4 and that combination has not been exercised.

Reproduce

atomic-quantizer/docs/runbook-nvfp4.md: the runbook, the toolbox, the estimator (nvfp4_kld.py), the paired comparison (nvfp4_compare), the aggregation over windows and runs (logs/aggregate.py) and the cast check (logs/cast-check.py), the latter two in the metrics dataset. The upstream reference code, encoding and license files are DeepSeek's, copied unchanged.