Related papers: Reducing Transformer Key-Value Cache Size with Cro…

Auto-regressive inference of transformers benefit greatly from Key-Value (KV) caching, but can lead to major memory bottlenecks as model size, batch size, and sequence length grow at scale. We introduce Multi-Layer Key-Value (MLKV) sharing,…

While Transformer self-attention offers strong parallelism, the Key-Value (KV) cache grows linearly with sequence length and becomes a bottleneck for inference efficiency. Multi-head latent attention was recently developed to compress the…

Excessive memory requirements of key and value features (KV-cache) present significant challenges in the autoregressive inference of large language models (LLMs), restricting both the speed and length of text generation. Approaches such as…

The key-value (KV) cache is a primary memory bottleneck in Transformers. We propose Low-Rank Key-Value (LRKV) attention, which reduces KV cache memory by exploiting redundancy across attention heads, while being compute efficient. Each…

Large language models have revolutionized data processing in numerous domains, with their ability to handle extended context reasoning receiving notable recognition. To speed up inference, maintaining a key-value (KV) cache memory is…

As long-context language modeling becomes increasingly important, the cost of maintaining and attending to large Key/Value (KV) caches grows rapidly, becoming a major bottleneck in both training and inference. While prior works such as…

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,…

Large language models (LLMs) face significant challenges in processing long contexts due to the linear growth of the key-value (KV) cache and quadratic complexity of self-attention. Existing approaches address these bottlenecks separately:…

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…

The Transformer architecture, underpinned by the Multi-Head Attention (MHA) mechanism, has become the de facto standard for state-of-the-art models in artificial intelligence. However, the quadratic computational complexity of MHA with…

LLM decoding is bottlenecked for large batches and long contexts by loading the key-value (KV) cache from high-bandwidth memory, which inflates per-token latency, while the sequential nature of decoding limits parallelism. We analyze the…

Huge memory consumption has been a major bottleneck for deploying high-throughput large language models in real-world applications. In addition to the large number of parameters, the key-value (KV) cache for the attention mechanism in the…

The Key-Value (KV) cache is central to the efficiency of transformer-based large language models (LLMs), storing previously computed vectors to accelerate inference. Yet, as sequence length and batch size grow, the cache becomes a major…

The deployment of large language models (LLMs) is often hindered by the extensive memory requirements of the Key-Value (KV) cache, especially as context lengths increase. Existing approaches to reduce the KV cache size involve either…

Long-context inference in large language models is bottlenecked by Key--Value (KV) cache loading during the decoding stage, where the sequential nature of generation requires repeatedly transferring the KV cache from off-chip High-Bandwidth…

We propose novel attention architectures, Multi-matrix Factorization Attention (MFA) and MFA-Key-Reuse (MFA-KR). Existing variants for standard Multi-Head Attention (MHA), including SOTA methods like MLA, fail to maintain as strong…

The advent of pre-trained large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized various natural language processing tasks. These models predominantly employ an auto-regressive decoding mechanism that utilizes Key-Value (KV) caches to eliminate…

The attention mechanism forms the foundational blocks for transformer language models. Recent approaches show that scaling the model achieves human-level performance. However, with increasing demands for scaling and constraints on hardware…

Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) is an innovative architecture proposed by DeepSeek, designed to ensure efficient and economical inference by significantly compressing the Key-Value (KV) cache into a latent vector. Compared to MLA,…

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…