English
Related papers

Related papers: DISTFLASHATTN: Distributed Memory-efficient Attent…

200 papers

Scaling depth is a key driver for large language models (LLMs). Yet, as LLMs become deeper, they often suffer from signal degradation: informative features formed in shallow layers are gradually diluted by repeated residual updates, making…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Lianghui Zhu , Yuxin Fang , Bencheng Liao , Shijie Wang , Tianheng Cheng , Zilong Huang , Chen Chen , Lai Wei , Yutao Zeng , Ya Wang , Yi Lin , Yu Li , Xinggang Wang

VRAM requirements for transformer models scale quadratically with context length due to the self-attention mechanism. In this paper we modify the decoder-only transformer, replacing self-attention with InAttention, which scales linearly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Joseph Eisner

In large language model (LLM) serving systems, executing each request consists of two phases: the compute-intensive prefill phase and the memory-intensive decoding phase. To prevent performance interference between the two phases, current…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-03-27 Yunkai Liang , Zhangyu Chen , Pengfei Zuo , Zhi Zhou , Xu Chen , Zhou Yu

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) set the state of the art in visual generation, yet their quadratic self-attention cost fundamentally limits scaling to long token sequences. Recent Top-K sparse attention approaches reduce the computation of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Yifan Zhou , Zeqi Xiao , Tianyi Wei , Shuai Yang , Xingang Pan

The quadratic complexity of attention mechanisms limits the efficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs) on long-text tasks. Recently, methods that dynamically estimate block importance have enabled efficient block sparse attention, leading…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Yixuan Wang , Huang He , Siqi Bao , Hua Wu , Haifeng Wang , Qingfu Zhu , Wanxiang Che

Current high-resolution vision-language models encode images as high-resolution image tokens and exhaustively take all these tokens to compute attention, which significantly increases the computational cost. To address this problem, we…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-07-30 Junyan Li , Delin Chen , Tianle Cai , Peihao Chen , Yining Hong , Zhenfang Chen , Yikang Shen , Chuang Gan

Transformer models trained on long sequences often achieve higher accuracy than short sequences. Unfortunately, conventional transformers struggle with long sequence training due to the overwhelming computation and memory requirements.…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2023-11-09 Xiao Wang , Isaac Lyngaas , Aristeidis Tsaris , Peng Chen , Sajal Dash , Mayanka Chandra Shekar , Tao Luo , Hong-Jun Yoon , Mohamed Wahib , John Gouley

Prefilling computational costs pose a significant bottleneck for Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) in long-context settings. While token pruning reduces sequence length, prior methods rely on heuristics that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Yujie Chen , Tailai Chen , Yifeng Gao , Zoe Wanying He , Yijue Xu , Shaobo Wang , Linfeng Zhang

The computational and memory demands of vanilla attention scale quadratically with the sequence length $N$, posing significant challenges for processing long sequences in Transformer models. FlashAttention alleviates these challenges by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Guoxia Wang , Jinle Zeng , Xiyuan Xiao , Siming Wu , Jiabin Yang , Lujing Zheng , Zeyu Chen , Jiang Bian , Dianhai Yu , Haifeng Wang

The quadratic complexity of standard attention mechanisms poses a significant scalability bottleneck for large language models (LLMs) in long-context scenarios. While hybrid attention strategies that combine sparse and full attention within…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Zecheng Tang , Quantong Qiu , Yi Yang , Zhiyi Hong , Haiya Xiang , Kebin Liu , Qingqing Dang , Juntao Li , Min Zhang

The attention mechanism has been the core component in modern transformer architectures. However, the computation of standard full attention scales quadratically with the sequence length, serving as a major bottleneck in long-context…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Yusheng Zhao , Hourun Li , Bohan Wu , Yichun Yin , Lifeng Shang , Jingyang Yuan , Meng Zhang , Ming Zhang

We introduce Glinthawk, an architecture for offline Large Language Model (LLM) inference. By leveraging a two-tiered structure, Glinthawk optimizes the utilization of the high-end accelerators ("Tier 1") by offloading the attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-12 Pouya Hamadanian , Sadjad Fouladi

Large Language Models (LLMs) with hundreds of billions of parameters have transformed the field of machine learning. However, serving these models at inference time is both compute and memory intensive, where a single request can require…

Large Language Models (LLMs) with extended context lengths face significant computational challenges during the pre-filling phase, primarily due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention. Existing methods typically employ dynamic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Yu Zhang , Dong Guo , Fang Wu , Guoliang Zhu , Dian Ding , Yiming Zhang

While Transformers have shown remarkable success in natural language processing, their attention mechanism's large memory requirements have limited their ability to handle longer contexts. Prior approaches, such as recurrent memory or…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-21 Amirkeivan Mohtashami , Martin Jaggi

Over the past 7 years, attention has become one of the most important primitives in deep learning. The primary approach to optimize attention is FlashAttention, which fuses the operation together, drastically improving both the runtime and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Juechu Dong , Boyuan Feng , Driss Guessous , Yanbo Liang , Horace He

This paper introduces a novel approach to enhance the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in processing and understanding extensive text sequences, a critical aspect in applications requiring deep comprehension and synthesis of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-15 Kaiqiang Song , Xiaoyang Wang , Sangwoo Cho , Xiaoman Pan , Dong Yu

Scaling Transformers to ultra-long contexts is bottlenecked by the $O(n^2 d)$ cost of self-attention. Existing methods reduce this cost along the sequence axis through local windows, kernel approximations, or token-level sparsity, but these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Yan Xie , Tiansheng Wen , Tangda Huang , Bo Chen , Chenyu You , Stefanie Jegelka , Yifei Wang

The quadratic complexity of attention mechanisms poses a critical bottleneck for large language models processing long contexts. While dynamic sparse attention methods offer input-adaptive efficiency, they face fundamental trade-offs:…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Siran Liu , Guoxia Wang , Sa Wang , Jinle Zeng , HaoYang Xie , Siyu Lou , JiaBin Yang , DianHai Yu , Haifeng Wang , Chao Yang

While the Self-Attention mechanism in the Transformer model has proven to be effective in many domains, we observe that it is less effective in more diverse settings (e.g. multimodality) due to the varying granularity of each token and the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Wayner Barrios , SouYoung Jin