ReSET: Accurate Latency-Critical NVFP4 Reasoning via Step-Aware Temperature Scaling
Problem: Large reasoning models (LRMs) incur high inference costs due to long reasoning traces, and directly applying NVFP4 low-precision quantization degrades reasoning accuracy while existing kernels fail to deliver latency benefits in small-batch autoregressive decoding. Method: ReSET proposes a step-aware temperature scaling method that estimates step-level uncertainty online using both token-level and step-level entropy signals, and introduces a CUDA-core small-M NVFP4 kernel for latency-critical decoding. Finding: ReSET improves NVFP4 reasoning accuracy by up to ~2 points over the NVFP4 baseline, and the custom kernel achieves up to 2.5× kernel-level speedup over NVFP4 vLLM and approximately 2× end-to-end decoding speedup over BF16. Why it matters: This work enables accurate and efficient low-precision inference for latency-critical LRM deployments, reducing computational and memory costs without sacrificing reasoning quality.