FlexPosit: Tunable Fractional Precision for LLM Inference Accelerators (MICRO 2026)

FlexPosit received all three MICRO 2026 artifact badges. To reproduce the paper's results exactly, use FlexPosit_artifact.

FlexPosit is a Posit-based mixed-precision quantization framework for LLMs. It allocates higher precision to the channel windows whose quantization most affects perplexity. The paper tunes precision by combining Posit(4,1) and Posit(5,1) across channel windows; other Posit formats can be selected through the configuration. This repo contains:

• flexposit, a Python package for quantizing HuggingFace models with FlexPosit.
• hardware/, the RTL of the FlexPosit datapath, part of the test-chip version of FlexPosit in an ongoing 12 nm tapeout shuttle.

Install

pip install flexposit               # Python >= 3.10; includes WikiText-2 perplexity
pip install "flexposit[eval]"       # optional: adds lm-evaluation-harness for downstream tasks (ARC, HellaSwag, ...)

To modify the code, run the shell scripts, or simulate the accelerator RTL in hardware/, clone the repo and install it in editable mode instead; your changes take effect without reinstalling:

git clone https://github.com/hplp/FlexPosit && cd FlexPosit
pip install -e .                    # or -e ".[eval]" for downstream tasks

Quick start

Use the Python API to quantize a model from your own code: load it, quantize it to a target average bit width, then evaluate or save it. For example, Mistral-7B at 4.4 bits:

import flexposit

model, tok = flexposit.load_model("mistral-7b")          # preset name, HF id or local path

# 4.4 bits on average, using the sensitivity ranking shipped for this model
# (uniform Posit(4,1) is bits=4.0 and needs no sensitivity)
state = flexposit.quantize(model, flexposit.FlexPositConfig(bits=4.4), sensitivity="mistral-7b")

print(flexposit.wikitext2_perplexity(model, tok))        # WikiText-2, seqlen 2048
flexposit.eval.lm_eval(model, tok, ["arc_easy"])         # any lm-eval task; needs flexposit[eval]
flexposit.save(model, tok, state, "out/mistral-7b-flexposit-4.4")

quantize rounds each weight to its channel's Posit format in place, so the model runs anywhere a HuggingFace model runs; state records each channel's Posit size and scale. To sweep many bit widths, use the command line below.

This example needs about 17 GB of GPU memory (a 24 GB card such as an RTX 4090 works); quantizing and computing WikiText-2 perplexity take about 2.5 minutes on a 4090. Smaller models such as phi-2 or gpt2-large need much less.

Command line

The scripts run the paper's workflow from the shell: quantize every weight to Posit(4,1), then sweep the average bit width from 4.0 to 5.0 and record WikiText-2 perplexity at each step. Results go to out/.

bash scripts/01_quantize_base.sh phi-2   # quantize weights to Posit(4,1)
bash scripts/02_mpq_sweep.sh    phi-2    # mixed-precision sweep over 4.0–5.0 bits

pip install flexposit also installs these steps as commands: flexposit-quantize (Posit base), flexposit-mpq (mixed precision) and flexposit-ppl (perplexity); each takes --help.

The shipped sensitivity CSVs hold the PPL-based sensitivity used in the paper. You can also profile your own, with a different configuration (e.g. the channel-window size, i.e. the granularity) or a different method (a Fisher-based one is provided). See docs/cli.md for these options and the tests.

Hardware

hardware/ holds the RTL of a bit-serial FlexPosit accelerator whose Posit precision (4–8 bits) changes per channel window at runtime.

sudo apt install iverilog   # or on macOS: brew install icarus-verilog
pip install numpy           # used by the Python reference model
cd hardware && make test

make test (about a minute) simulates the RTL and checks it bit for bit against a Python model: every FP8 × Posit product on a single PE, then random matrix tiles through the whole array.

Supported models

Each has a pre-computed sensitivity CSV bundled with the package (flexposit.shipped_sensitivity()); the CLIs and the Python API accept the short names, both for the model and for sensitivity=.

Layout

src/flexposit/       Python package (API, quantizers, mixed precision, sensitivity)
src/flexposit/data/  sensitivity CSVs for the supported models
scripts/             shell wrappers for the command-line workflow
hardware/            RTL, testbenches and bit-exact model
docs/cli.md          command-line guide
tests/               test suite

Development

pip install -e ".[dev]"
ruff check src tests
pytest                     # CPU, a few seconds, no downloads
make -C hardware test      # RTL regression, needs Icarus Verilog

Issues and pull requests are welcome.

Paper & citation

Preprint (arXiv): https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04724

@misc{gao2026flexposit,
  title         = {FlexPosit: Tunable Fractional Precision for LLM Inference Accelerators},
  author        = {Gao, Yimin and Dai, Liangtao and Yin, Jun and Guo, Xinfei and Stan, Mircea},
  year          = {2026},
  eprint        = {2609.04724},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  primaryClass  = {cs.AR},
  doi           = {10.48550/arXiv.2609.04724}
}

License

MIT; see LICENSE.

Contact

Yimin Gao yg9bq@virginia.edu