Related papers: Block-Attention for Efficient Prefilling

With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a critical approach to supplement the inherent knowledge limitations of LLMs. However, due to the typically large volume of…

A practical large language model (LLM) service may involve a long system prompt, which specifies the instructions, examples, and knowledge documents of the task and is reused across requests. However, the long system prompt causes…

Large Language Models (LLMs) face significant computational bottlenecks during inference due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention mechanisms, particularly as context lengths increase. We introduce SpecAttn, a novel training-free…

Inference on large language models (LLMs) can be expensive in terms of the compute and memory costs involved, especially when long sequence lengths are used. In particular, the self-attention mechanism used in LLM inference contributes…

As large language models (LLMs) and visual language models (VLMs) grow in scale and application, attention mechanisms have become a central computational bottleneck due to their high memory and time complexity. While many efficient…

Recent large language models (LLMs) face increasing inference latency as input context length and model size continue to grow. In particular, the retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) technique, which enhances LLM responses by incorporating…

Linear attention is an efficient attention mechanism that has recently emerged as a promising alternative to conventional softmax attention. With its ability to process tokens in linear computational complexities, linear attention, in…

Attention is the dominant source of latency during long-context LLM inference, an increasingly popular workload with reasoning models and RAG. We propose Kascade, a training-free sparse attention method that leverages known observations…

Long-context inference in LLMs faces the dual challenges of quadratic attention complexity and prohibitive KV cache memory. While token-level sparse attention offers superior accuracy, its indexing overhead is costly; block-level methods…

Many advanced Large Language Model (LLM) applications require long-context processing, but the self-attention module becomes a bottleneck during the prefilling stage of inference due to its quadratic time complexity with respect to sequence…

While RAG demonstrates remarkable capabilities in LLM applications, its effectiveness is hindered by the ever-increasing length of retrieved contexts, which introduces information redundancy and substantial computational overhead. Existing…

Diffusion transformer-based video generation models (DiTs) have recently attracted widespread attention for their excellent generation quality. However, their computational cost remains a major bottleneck-attention alone accounts for over…

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…

Distributed attention is a fundamental problem for scaling context window for Large Language Models (LLMs). The state-of-the-art method, Ring-Attention, suffers from scalability limitations due to its excessive communication traffic. This…

The attention operator remains a critical performance bottleneck in large language models (LLMs), particularly for long-context scenarios. While FlashAttention is the most widely used and effective GPU-aware acceleration algorithm, it must…

Large reasoning models (LRMs) achieve state-of-the-art performance on challenging benchmarks by generating long chains of intermediate steps, but their inference cost is dominated by decoding, where each new token must attend to the entire…

Large language models are increasingly applied to multi-document and long-form inputs, yet long-context inference remains memory- and noise-inefficient. Key-value (KV) caching scales linearly with context length, while external retrieval…

In large language model (LLM) serving systems, executing each request consists of two phases: the compute-intensive prefill phase and the memory-intensive decoding phase. To prevent performance interference between the two phases, current…

The self-attention mechanism is the key to the success of transformers in recent Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the quadratic computational cost $O(n^2)$ in the input sequence length $n$ is a notorious obstacle for further…

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…