Related papers: FlashAttention-3: Fast and Accurate Attention with…

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…

With the increasing volumes of Large Language Models (LLMs) and the expanding context lengths, attention computation has become a key performance bottleneck in LLM serving. For fast attention computation, recent practices often parallelize…

Large language models (LLMs) face low hardware efficiency during decoding, especially for long-context reasoning tasks. This paper introduces Step-3, a 321B-parameter VLM with hardware-aware model-system co-design optimized for minimizing…

Token pruning methods for Vision Transformers (ViTs) promise quadratic reductions in attention FLOPs by dropping uninformative patches. Yet standard variable-length attention APIs -- including FlashAttention-2's varlen and PyTorch's…

Sparse attention has been proposed as a way to alleviate the quadratic cost of transformers, a central bottleneck in long-context training. A promising line of work is $\alpha$-entmax attention, a differentiable sparse alternative to…

State-of-the-art sparse attention methods for reducing decoding latency fall into two main categories: approximate top-$k$ (and its extension, top-$p$) and recently introduced sampling-based estimation. However, these approaches are…

The attention layer, a core component of Transformer-based LLMs, brings out inefficiencies in current GPU systems due to its low operational intensity and the substantial memory requirements of KV caches. We propose a High-bandwidth…

Diffusion models excel in high-fidelity image generation but face scalability limits due to transformers' quadratic attention complexity. Plug-and-play token reduction methods like ToMeSD and ToFu reduce FLOPs by merging redundant tokens in…

Recently, the Transformer machine translation system has shown strong results by stacking attention layers on both the source and target-language sides. But the inference of this model is slow due to the heavy use of dot-product attention…

Inference with Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) on long sequences is both costly and slow due to the quadratic complexity of the self-attention mechanism. We introduce Star Attention, a two-phase block-sparse approximation…

Transformers, renowned for their self-attention mechanism, have achieved state-of-the-art performance across various tasks in natural language processing, computer vision, time-series modeling, etc. However, one of the challenges with deep…

Effective attention modules have played a crucial role in the success of Transformer-based large language models (LLMs), but the quadratic time and memory complexities of these attention modules also pose a challenge when processing long…

Transformers have been successfully used in various fields and are becoming the standard tools in computer vision. However, self-attention, a core component of transformers, has a quadratic complexity problem, which limits the use of…

When implementations of the Transformer's self-attention layer utilize SRAM instead of DRAM, they can achieve significant speedups. The Tenstorrent Grayskull architecture provides a large SRAM, distributed across a grid of cores. This work…

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…

The paradigm of Transformers using the self-attention mechanism has manifested its advantage in learning graph-structured data. Yet, Graph Transformers are capable of modeling full range dependencies but are often deficient in extracting…

Currently, one main research line in designing a more efficient vision transformer is reducing the computational cost of self attention modules by adopting sparse attention or using local attention windows. In contrast, we propose a…

The Transformer translation model is based on the multi-head attention mechanism, which can be parallelized easily. The multi-head attention network performs the scaled dot-product attention function in parallel, empowering the model by…

Transformers have become the backbone of neural network architecture for most machine learning applications. Their widespread use has resulted in multiple efforts on accelerating attention, the basic building block of transformers. This…

Self-attention has recently been adopted for a wide range of sequence modeling problems. Despite its effectiveness, self-attention suffers from quadratic compute and memory requirements with respect to sequence length. Successful approaches…