Related papers: KV-weights are all you need for skipless transform…

Large language model (LLM) inference is increasingly bottlenecked by the Key-Value (KV) cache, yet the fine-grained structure of attention-head activations remains poorly understood. We show that pretrained Transformers exhibit a pervasive…

Large Language Models (LLMs) deliver strong performance but are difficult to deploy under tight memory and compute constraints. Low-bit post-training quantization (PTQ) is a promising direction; however, it typically relies on calibration…

Key-Value (KV) cache memory and bandwidth increasingly dominate large language model inference cost in long-context and long-generation regimes. Architectures such as multi-head latent attention (MLA) and hybrid sliding-window attention…

We revisit a basic question in sequence modeling: is explicit self-attention actually necessary for strong performance and reasoning? We argue that standard multi-head attention is best seen as a form of tensor lifting: hidden vectors are…

Large Language Models (LLMs) rely heavily on Key-Value (KV) caching to minimize inference latency. However, standard KV caches are context-dependent: reusing a cached document in a new context requires recomputing KV states to account for…

Multi-headed Attention's (MHA) quadratic compute and linearly growing KV-cache make long-context transformers expensive to train and serve. Prior works such as Grouped Query Attention (GQA) and Multi-Latent Attention (MLA) shrink the cache,…

Multi-query attention (MQA), which only uses a single key-value head, drastically speeds up decoder inference. However, MQA can lead to quality degradation, and moreover it may not be desirable to train a separate model just for faster…

Attention mechanisms underpin the success of large language models (LLMs), yet their substantial computational and memory overhead poses challenges for optimizing efficiency and performance. A critical bottleneck arises as KV cache and…

Self-attention in Transformers is typically implemented as $\mathrm{softmax}(QK^\top/\sqrt{d})V$, where $Q=XW_Q$, $K=XW_K$, and $V=XW_V$ are learned linear projections of the input $X$. We ask whether these learned projections are…

Looped Transformers (LT) have emerged as a powerful architecture by iterating their layers multiple times before decoding the final token. However, pairing them with full attention retains quadratic complexity, making them computationally…

To enhance the efficiency of the attention mechanism within large language models (LLMs), previous works primarily compress the KV cache or group attention heads, while largely overlooking redundancy between layers. Our comprehensive…

Standard Transformer attention uses identical dimensionality for queries, keys, and values, yet these components serve different roles: queries and keys produce scalar attention weights (selection), while values carry rich representations…

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are plagued by exorbitant inference costs attributable to the profusion of visual tokens within the vision encoder. The redundant visual tokens engenders a substantial computational load and…

Transformer-based QA models use input-wide self-attention -- i.e. across both the question and the input passage -- at all layers, causing them to be slow and memory-intensive. It turns out that we can get by without input-wide…

The transformer has revolutionized modern AI across language, vision, and beyond. It consists of $L$ layers, each running $H$ attention heads in parallel and feeding the combined output to the subsequent layer. In attention, the input…

Recently, vision transformers have become very popular. However, deploying them in many applications is computationally expensive partly due to the Softmax layer in the attention block. We introduce a simple but effective, Softmax-free…

Transformer-based models have significantly improved performance across a range of multimodal understanding tasks, such as visual question answering and action recognition. However, multimodal Transformers significantly suffer from a…

We theoretically investigate whether the Query, Key, Value weight triplet can be reduced in encoder-only and decoder-only transformers. Under mild assumptions, we prove that one of the Query, Key or Value weights are redundant and can be…

As vision-language models (VLMs) tackle increasingly complex and multimodal tasks, the rapid growth of Key-Value (KV) cache imposes significant memory and computational bottlenecks during inference. While Multi-Head Latent Attention (MLA)…

While Transformer-based models have shown impressive language modeling performance, the large computation cost is often prohibitive for practical use. Attention head pruning, which removes unnecessary attention heads in the multihead…