Related papers: Weighted Grouped Query Attention in Transformers
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 has revolutionized deep learning through its Self-Attention mechanism, which effectively captures contextual information. However, the memory footprint of Self-Attention presents significant challenges for…
Grouped-query attention (GQA) has been widely adopted in LLMs to mitigate the complexity of multi-head attention (MHA). To transform an MHA to a GQA, neighbour queries in MHA are evenly split into groups where each group shares the value…
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…
Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA), the attention used in DeepSeek-V2/V3, jointly compresses keys and values into a low-rank latent and matches the H100 roofline almost perfectly. Its trained weights, however, expose only one decoding path -…
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance across diverse natural language processing tasks. However, as the model size and the input sequence's length increase, the linearly increasing key-value (KV) cache…
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…
Key-value (KV) caching plays an essential role in accelerating decoding for transformer-based autoregressive large language models (LLMs). However, the amount of memory required to store the KV cache can become prohibitive at long sequence…
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,…
The self-attention mechanism, while foundational to modern Transformer architectures, suffers from a critical inefficiency: it frequently allocates substantial attention to redundant or noisy context. Differential Attention addressed this…
The pursuit of reducing the memory footprint of the self-attention mechanism in multi-headed self attention (MHA) spawned a rich portfolio of methods, e.g., group-query attention (GQA) and multi-head latent attention (MLA). The methods…
The choice of attention mechanism in Transformer models involves a critical trade-off between modeling quality and inference efficiency. Multi-Head Attention (MHA) offers the best quality but suffers from large Key-Value (KV) cache memory…
Grouped-Query Attention (GQA) is a widely adopted strategy for reducing the computational cost of attention layers in large language models (LLMs). However, current GQA configurations are often suboptimal because they overlook how context…
Scaling language models to handle longer input sequences typically necessitates large key-value (KV) caches, resulting in substantial memory overhead during inference. In this paper, we propose Tensor Product Attention (TPA), a novel…
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…
Linear attention methods offer a compelling alternative to softmax attention due to their efficiency in recurrent decoding. Recent research has focused on enhancing standard linear attention by incorporating gating while retaining its…
Hyperparameter transfer across model architectures dramatically reduces the amount of compute necessary for tuning large language models (LLMs). The maximal update parameterization ({\mu}P) ensures transfer through principled mathematical…
Massive transformer-based models face several challenges, including slow and computationally intensive pre-training and over-parametrization. This paper addresses these challenges by proposing a versatile method called GQKVA, which…
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…
Large language models (LLMs) with billions of parameters demonstrate impressive performance. However, the widely used Multi-Head Attention (MHA) in LLMs incurs substantial computational and memory costs during inference. While some efforts…