Related papers: Beyond 2:4: exploring V:N:M sparsity for efficient…
Transformers are the mainstream of NLP applications and are becoming increasingly popular in other domains such as Computer Vision. Despite the improvements in model quality, the enormous computation costs make Transformers difficult at…
The quadratic complexity of standard attention mechanisms poses a significant scalability bottleneck for large language models (LLMs) in long-context scenarios. While hybrid attention strategies that combine sparse and full attention within…
Machine learning (ML) models are widely used in many important domains. For efficiently processing these computational- and memory-intensive applications, tensors of these over-parameterized models are compressed by leveraging sparsity,…
Exploiting activation sparsity is a promising approach to significantly accelerating the inference process of large language models (LLMs) without compromising performance. However, activation sparsity is determined by activation functions,…
Natural Language Processing (NLP) has recently achieved success by using huge pre-trained Transformer networks. However, these models often contain hundreds of millions or even billions of parameters, bringing challenges to online…
Sparse training is one of the promising techniques to reduce the computational cost of DNNs while retaining high accuracy. In particular, N:M fine-grained structured sparsity, where only N out of consecutive M elements can be nonzero, has…
The observation that activation sparsity emerges in MLP blocks of standardly trained Transformers offers an opportunity to drastically reduce computation costs without sacrificing performance. To theoretically explain this phenomenon,…
Channel permutation is a powerful technique for enhancing the accuracy of N:M sparse models by reordering the channels of weight matrices to prioritize the retention of important weights. However, traditional channel permutation methods…
Convolutional neural network (CNN) inference on mobile devices demands efficient hardware acceleration of low-precision (INT8) general matrix multiplication (GEMM). Exploiting data sparsity is a common approach to further accelerate GEMM…
Model inversion, which aims to reconstruct the original training data from pre-trained discriminative models, is especially useful when the original training data is unavailable due to privacy, usage rights, or size constraints. However,…
Although scaling laws and many empirical results suggest that increasing the size of Vision Transformers often improves performance, model accuracy and training behavior are not always monotonically increasing with scale. Focusing on…
Ternary quantization has emerged as a powerful technique for reducing both computational and memory footprint of large language models (LLM), enabling efficient real-time inference deployment without significantly compromising model…
We implement two novel algorithms for sparse-matrix dense-matrix multiplication (SpMM) on the GPU. Our algorithms expect the sparse input in the popular compressed-sparse-row (CSR) format and thus do not require expensive format conversion.…
Our community has greatly improved the efficiency of deep learning applications, including by exploiting sparsity in inputs. Most of that work, though, is for inference, where weight sparsity is known statically, and/or for specialized…
In this paper, we address the challenge of determining the layer-wise sparsity rates of large language models (LLMs) through a theoretical perspective. Specifically, we identify a critical issue of ''$\textbf{reconstruction error…
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…
While vision transformers have achieved impressive results, effectively and efficiently accelerating these models can further boost performances. In this work, we propose a dense/sparse training framework to obtain a unified model, enabling…
Large Language Models (LLMs) offer strong capabilities but incur high inference costs due to dense computation and memory access. Training-free activation sparsity is a promising approach for efficient LLM inference, yet existing methods…
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance across a versatile set of tasks. A key challenge in accelerating VLMs is storing and accessing the large Key-Value (KV) cache that encodes long visual contexts, such as…
With the widespread adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs), the demand for high-performance LLM inference services continues to grow. To meet this demand, a growing number of AI accelerators have been proposed, such as Google TPU, Huawei…