Related papers: SageAttention2: Efficient Attention with Thorough …

Self-attention is at the heart of the popular Transformer architecture, yet suffers from quadratic time and memory complexity. The breakthrough FlashAttention algorithm revealed I/O complexity as the true bottleneck in scaling Transformers.…

Sparse attention, which selectively attends to a subset of tokens in the context was supposed to be efficient. However, its theoretical reduction in FLOPs has rarely translated into wall-clock speed-up over its dense attention counterparts…

Large Language Models (LLMs) encounter severe memory inefficiencies during long-context inference due to conventional handling of key-value (KV) caches. In this work, we introduce a novel integration of PagedAttention with PyTorch's…

Sparse-Linear Attention (SLA) combines sparse and linear attention to accelerate diffusion models and has shown strong performance in video generation. However, (i) SLA relies on a heuristic split that assigns computations to the sparse or…

The computational demands of self-attention mechanisms pose a critical challenge for transformer-based video generation, particularly in synthesizing ultra-long sequences. Current approaches, such as factorized attention and fixed sparse…

Recently Transformers have provided state-of-the-art performance in sparse matching, crucial to realize high-performance 3D vision applications. Yet, these Transformers lack efficiency due to the quadratic computational complexity of their…

Attention mechanisms, particularly softmax attention, have been instrumental in the success of transformer-based models such as GPT. However, the quadratic memory complexity of softmax attention with respect to sequence length poses…

Quantization can accelerate large language model (LLM) inference. Going beyond INT8 quantization, the research community is actively exploring even lower precision, such as INT4. Nonetheless, state-of-the-art INT4 quantization techniques…

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…

TiledAttention is a scaled dot-product attention (SDPA) forward operator for SDPA research on NVIDIA GPUs. Implemented in cuTile Python (TileIR) and exposed as a PyTorch-callable function, it is easier to modify than low-level CUDA…

Recent advances in single-frame object detection and segmentation techniques have motivated a wide range of works to extend these methods to process video streams. In this paper, we explore the idea of hard attention aimed for…

Neural network quantization is a promising compression technique to reduce memory footprint and save energy consumption, potentially leading to real-time inference. However, there is a performance gap between quantized and full-precision…

Catastrophic forgetting poses a fundamental challenge in continual learning, particularly when models are quantized for deployment efficiency. We systematically investigate the interplay between quantization precision (FP16, INT8, INT4) and…

Softmax Attention has a quadratic time complexity in sequence length, which becomes prohibitive to run at long contexts, even with highly optimized GPU kernels. For example, FlashAttention-2/3 (exact, GPU-optimized implementations of…

The computational and memory demands of vanilla attention scale quadratically with the sequence length $N$, posing significant challenges for processing long sequences in Transformer models. FlashAttention alleviates these challenges by…

Over the past 7 years, attention has become one of the most important primitives in deep learning. The primary approach to optimize attention is FlashAttention, which fuses the operation together, drastically improving both the runtime and…

Attention is the cornerstone of modern Large Language Models (LLMs). Yet its quadratic complexity hinders efficiency and scalability, especially for long-context processing. A promising approach is to leverage sparsity in attention.…

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…

Looped Transformers (LT) have emerged as a powerful architecture by iterating their layers multiple times before decoding the final token. However, pairing them with full attention retains quadratic complexity, making them computationally…

Attention is a core operation in numerous machine learning and artificial intelligence models. This work focuses on the acceleration of attention kernel using FlashAttention algorithm, in vector processors, particularly those based on the…