Related papers: FlashNorm: Fast Normalization for Transformers

Inspired by BatchNorm, there has been an explosion of normalization layers in deep learning. Recent works have identified a multitude of beneficial properties in BatchNorm to explain its success. However, given the pursuit of alternative…

The ever-increasing sizes of large language models necessitate distributed solutions for fast inference that exploit multi-dimensional parallelism, where computational loads are split across various accelerators such as GPU clusters.…

Transformers are central to recent successes in natural language processing and computer vision. Transformers have a mostly uniform backbone where layers alternate between feed-forward and self-attention in order to build a deep network.…

Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) have made a significant impact on various domains. However, LLMs' efficiency suffers from both heavy computation and memory overheads. Compression techniques like sparsification and…

We evaluate three simple, normalization-centric changes to improve Transformer training. First, we show that pre-norm residual connections (PreNorm) and smaller initializations enable warmup-free, validation-based training with large…

Preconditioned adaptive methods have gained significant attention for training deep neural networks, as they capture rich curvature information of the loss landscape. The central challenge in this field lies in balancing preconditioning…

Low-resource language translation is a challenging but socially valuable NLP task. Building on recent work adapting the Transformer's normalization to this setting, we propose QKNorm, a normalization technique that modifies the attention…

How to reduce compute and memory requirements of neural networks (NNs) without sacrificing performance? Many recent works use sparse Mixtures of Experts (MoEs) to build resource-efficient large language models (LMs). Here we introduce…

As inference on Large Language Models (LLMs) emerges as an important workload in machine learning applications, weight quantization has become a standard technique for efficient GPU deployment. Quantization not only reduces model size, but…

In contrast to RNNs, which compress their history into a single hidden state, Transformers can attend to all past tokens directly. However, standard Transformers rely solely on the hidden state from the previous layer to represent the…

State-of-the-art results in large language models (LLMs) often rely on scale, which becomes computationally expensive. This has sparked a research agenda to reduce these models' parameter counts and computational costs without significantly…

This work analyzes the training dynamics of Image Restoration (IR) Transformers and uncovers a critical yet overlooked issue: conventional LayerNorm (LN) drives feature magnitudes to diverge to a million scale and collapses channel-wise…

The LayerNorm (LN) layer in GPT-style transformer models has long been a hindrance to mechanistic interpretability. LN is a crucial component required to stabilize the training of large language models, and LN or the similar RMSNorm have…

LLMs have seen rapid adoption in all domains. They need to be trained on high-end high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructures and ingest massive amounts of input data. Unsurprisingly, at such a large scale, unexpected events (e.g.,…

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) are emerging as a promising alternative to autoregressive models (ARMs) due to their ability to capture bidirectional context and the potential for parallel generation. Despite the advantages, dLLM…

We present FlashLips, a two-stage, mask-free lip-sync system that decouples lips control from rendering and achieves real-time performance, with our U-Net variant running at over 100 FPS on a single GPU, while matching the visual quality of…

Efficiently solving large-scale linear systems is a critical challenge in electromagnetic simulations, particularly when using the Crank-Nicolson Finite-Difference Time-Domain (CN-FDTD) method. Existing iterative solvers are commonly…

RAPID-LLM is a unified performance modeling framework for large language model (LLM) training and inference on GPU clusters. It couples a DeepFlow-based frontend that generates hardware-aware, operator-level Chakra execution traces from an…

Quantization significantly accelerates inference in large language models (LLMs) by replacing original high-precision matrices with low-precision counterparts. Recent advances in weight-activation quantization have primarily focused on…

Scaling autoregressive large language models (LLMs) has driven unprecedented progress but comes with vast computational costs. In this work, we tackle these costs by leveraging unstructured sparsity within an LLM's feedforward layers, the…