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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…

Transformer-based large language models (e.g., BERT and GPT) achieve great success, and fine-tuning, which tunes a pre-trained model on a task-specific dataset, is the standard practice to utilize these models for downstream tasks. However,…

Attention-based models have revolutionized AI, but the quadratic cost of self-attention incurs severe computational and memory overhead. Sparse attention methods alleviate this by skipping low-relevance token pairs. However, current…

While diffusion language models (DLMs) offer a promising alternative to autoregressive models (ARs), existing open-source DLMs suffer from high inference latency. This bottleneck is mainly due to the attention's quadratic complexity with…

As its core computation, a self-attention mechanism gauges pairwise correlations across the entire input sequence. Despite favorable performance, calculating pairwise correlations is prohibitively costly. While recent work has shown the…

Leveraging long contexts is crucial for advanced AI systems, but attention computation poses a scalability challenge. While scaled dot-product attention (SDPA) exhibits token sparsity, i.e. only a few pivotal tokens significantly contribute…

Modern large language models increasingly require long contexts for reasoning and multi-document tasks, but attention's quadratic complexity creates a severe computational bottleneck. We present Block-Sparse FlashAttention (BSFA), a drop-in…

We present the first comprehensive study of latent multi-head attention (MLA) for small language models, revealing interesting efficiency-quality trade-offs. Training 30M-parameter GPT models on 100,000 synthetic stories, we benchmark three…

Generating high-fidelity long videos with Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) is often hindered by significant latency, primarily due to the computational demands of attention mechanisms. For instance, generating an 8-second 720p video (110K…

Accommodating long sequences efficiently in autoregressive Transformers, especially within an extended context window, poses significant challenges due to the quadratic computational complexity and substantial KV memory requirements…

Scaling Transformers to ultra-long contexts is bottlenecked by the $O(n^2 d)$ cost of self-attention. Existing methods reduce this cost along the sequence axis through local windows, kernel approximations, or token-level sparsity, but these…

Spoken language understanding (SLU) requires a model to analyze input acoustic signal to understand its linguistic content and make predictions. To boost the models' performance, various pre-training methods have been proposed to learn rich…

Long-context LLM serving is bottlenecked by the cost of attending over ever-growing KV caches. Dynamic sparse attention promises relief by accessing only a small, query-dependent subset of the KV state per decoding step and extending the KV…

An efficient attention implementation is essential for large models due to its quadratic time complexity. Fortunately, attention commonly exhibits sparsity, i.e., many values in the attention map are near zero, allowing for the omission of…

High-performance sparse matrix-matrix (SpMM) multiplication is paramount for science and industry, as the ever-increasing sizes of data prohibit using dense data structures. Yet, existing hardware, such as Tensor Cores (TC), is ill-suited…

Video Diffusion Transformers have revolutionized high-fidelity video generation but suffer from the massive computational burden of self-attention. While sparse attention provides a promising acceleration solution, existing methods…

Transformers are considered one of the most important deep learning models since 2018, in part because it establishes state-of-the-art (SOTA) records and could potentially replace existing Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). Despite the remarkable…

The inference process for large language models is slow and memory-intensive, with one of the most critical bottlenecks being excessive Key-Value (KV) cache accesses. This paper introduces "Double Sparsity," a novel post-training sparse…

Recent advances in large language models highlighted the excessive quadratic cost of self-attention. Despite the significant research efforts, subquadratic attention methods still suffer from inferior performance in practice. We hypothesize…

In long-context large language model (LLM) inference, the prefill stage dominates computation due to self-attention over the complete input context. Sparse attention significantly reduces self-attention computation by limiting each token's…