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Comments on Uniform floating point from unsigned integer
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Uniform floating point from unsigned integer
How can I turn uniform samples of unsigned n-bit (n=16/32/64) integers (over the whole range of integers) into uniform samples of n-bit IEEE floats in [0, 1]? By uniform, I mean the continuous uniform distribution. All bounds are inclusive.
It needs to be accurate enough for stats/ML.
I'm using the StableHLO API, but an answer in e.g. C with equivalent maths and bit ops would be trivial to translate. Note this API can bitcast naively to float (i.e. reinterpret bits as they are as a float), and cast to float using the (approx) numerical value.
NB. I assume I can scale [0, 1] to [a, b] as samples * (a - b) + b since that's what XLA does (though I will have to be careful about overflow).
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