Related papers: SparseAccelerate: Efficient Long-Context Inference…
Inference with Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) on long sequences is both costly and slow due to the quadratic complexity of the self-attention mechanism. We introduce Star Attention, a two-phase block-sparse approximation…
Large Language Models (LLMs) incur quadratic attention complexity with input length, creating a major time bottleneck in the prefilling stage. Existing acceleration methods largely exploit attention score sparsity by estimating blocks with…
As Large Language Models (LLMs) scale to million-token contexts, traditional Mechanistic Interpretability techniques for analyzing attention scale quadratically with context length, demanding terabytes of memory beyond 100,000 tokens. We…
The integration of long-context capabilities with visual understanding unlocks unprecedented potential for Vision Language Models (VLMs). However, the quadratic attention complexity during the pre-filling phase remains a significant…
As software projects rapidly evolve, software artifacts become more complex and defects behind get harder to identify. The emerging Transformer-based approaches, though achieving remarkable performance, struggle with long code sequences due…
Long-context LLMs increasingly rely on extended, reusable prefill prompts for agents and domain Q&A, pushing attention and KV-cache to become the dominant decode-time bottlenecks. While sparse attention reduces computation and transfer…
Long-context video understanding and generation pose a significant computational challenge for Transformer-based video models due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention. While existing sparse attention methods employ coarse-grained…
Scaling the context length of large language models (LLMs) offers significant benefits but is computationally expensive. This expense stems primarily from the self-attention mechanism, whose $O(N^2)$ complexity with respect to sequence…
Large vision-language models (VLMs) enable joint processing of text and images. However, incorporating vision data significantly increases the prompt length, resulting in a longer time to first token (TTFT). This bottleneck can be…
Sparse Attention is a technique that approximates standard attention computation with sub-quadratic complexity. This is achieved by selectively ignoring smaller entries in the attention matrix during the softmax function computation.…
Long-context understanding is crucial for many NLP applications, yet transformers struggle with efficiency due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention. Sparse attention methods alleviate this cost but often impose static, predefined…
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are commonly derived by extending pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) with visual capabilities. In this work, we investigate how MLLMs process visual inputs by analyzing their attention…
As large language models (LLMs) continue to support increasingly longer contexts, the memory demand for key-value (KV) caches during decoding grows rapidly, becoming a critical bottleneck in both GPU memory capacity and PCIe bandwidth.…
Scaling inference for large language models (LLMs) is increasingly constrained by limited GPU memory, especially due to growing key-value (KV) caches required for long-context generation. While existing approaches offload KV caches to CPU…
Transformers have revolutionized natural language processing, but their quadratic complexity with respect to sequence length remains a fundamental bottleneck for long-range modeling. While sparse attention mechanisms like RingAttention…
Training and serving long-context large language models (LLMs) incurs substantial overhead. To address this, two critical steps are often required: a pretrained LLM typically undergoes a separate stage for context length extension by…
Long-term memory is a cornerstone of human intelligence. Enabling AI to process lifetime-scale information remains a long-standing pursuit in the field. Due to the constraints of full-attention architectures, the effective context length of…
Large language models (LLMs) with hundreds of billions of parameters have sparked a new wave of exciting AI applications. However, they are computationally expensive at inference time. Sparsity is a natural approach to reduce this cost, but…
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…
With the increasing volumes of Large Language Models (LLMs) and the expanding context lengths, attention computation has become a key performance bottleneck in LLM serving. For fast attention computation, recent practices often parallelize…