Full-Stack FP4: Stable LLM Pretraining with Quantized Projections, Optimizers, and Attention

Recent NVFP4 pretraining work has primarily optimized Transformer linear projections, leaving persistent optimizer states, optimizer computation, and low-precision attention forward--backward paths less explored. We present Full-Stack FP4, a modular NVFP4 framework with separate recipes for projections, AdamW states, Root/Muon computation, and attention. LoRA-SVD protects a compact projection subspace in BF16 while retaining full-shape NVFP4 computation, reducing the linear-only loss gap from 1.40\% to 0.61\%. An ordered square-root, tile-mean, and Hadamard pipeline enables stable NVFP4 AdamW momentum storage; shape-dependent coefficients and clipping stabilize direct NVFP4 Root iterations; and mixed-precision attention retains softmax-sensitive operations in BF16. On 3B pretraining with 64B tokens, BF16 and Full-Stack FP4 reach losses of 2.267 and 2.286, a 0.838\% gap. Their average zero-shot perplexities are 26.675 and 26.665, respectively, with Full-Stack FP4 averaging 0.10 percentage points lower in accuracy. Native four-block measurements on one RTX 5090 show 2.50--2.83times Root speedups over optimized BF16 and 37.9--42.5\% lower AdamW peak memory.