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The advent of pre-trained large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized various natural language processing tasks. These models predominantly employ an auto-regressive decoding mechanism that utilizes Key-Value (KV) caches to eliminate…
Grouped-query attention (GQA) has been widely adopted in LLMs to mitigate the complexity of multi-head attention (MHA). To transform an MHA to a GQA, neighbour queries in MHA are evenly split into groups where each group shares the value…
Excessive memory requirements of key and value features (KV-cache) present significant challenges in the autoregressive inference of large language models (LLMs), restricting both the speed and length of text generation. Approaches such as…
Large language models (LLMs) with billions of parameters demonstrate impressive performance. However, the widely used Multi-Head Attention (MHA) in LLMs incurs substantial computational and memory costs during inference. While some efforts…
Multi-Head Attention (MHA) is the core computational primitive underlying modern Large Language Models (LLMs). However, MHA suffers from a fundamental linear scaling limitation: $H$ attention heads produce exactly $H$ independent attention…
Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) is an innovative architecture proposed by DeepSeek, designed to ensure efficient and economical inference by significantly compressing the Key-Value (KV) cache into a latent vector. Compared to MLA,…
Multi-query attention (MQA), which only uses a single key-value head, drastically speeds up decoder inference. However, MQA can lead to quality degradation, and moreover it may not be desirable to train a separate model just for faster…
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly boosted long-context processing. However, the increasing key-value (KV) cache size poses critical challenges to memory and execution efficiency. Most KV cache compression…
Multi-headed Attention's (MHA) quadratic compute and linearly growing KV-cache make long-context transformers expensive to train and serve. Prior works such as Grouped Query Attention (GQA) and Multi-Latent Attention (MLA) shrink the cache,…
The attention mechanism forms the foundational blocks for transformer language models. Recent approaches show that scaling the model achieves human-level performance. However, with increasing demands for scaling and constraints on hardware…
Grouped-Query Attention (GQA) is a widely adopted strategy for reducing the computational cost of attention layers in large language models (LLMs). However, current GQA configurations are often suboptimal because they overlook how context…
As long-context language modeling becomes increasingly important, the cost of maintaining and attending to large Key/Value (KV) caches grows rapidly, becoming a major bottleneck in both training and inference. While prior works such as…
While Transformer self-attention offers strong parallelism, the Key-Value (KV) cache grows linearly with sequence length and becomes a bottleneck for inference efficiency. Multi-head latent attention was recently developed to compress the…
Key-value (KV) caching plays an essential role in accelerating decoding for transformer-based autoregressive large language models (LLMs). However, the amount of memory required to store the KV cache can become prohibitive at long sequence…
Key-Value (KV) cache memory and bandwidth increasingly dominate large language model inference cost in long-context and long-generation regimes. Architectures such as multi-head latent attention (MLA) and hybrid sliding-window attention…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant strides in natural language processing and generation, yet their ability to handle long-context input remains constrained by the quadratic complexity of attention computation and…
Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA), the attention used in DeepSeek-V2/V3, jointly compresses keys and values into a low-rank latent and matches the H100 roofline almost perfectly. Its trained weights, however, expose only one decoding path -…
Pruning is a highly effective approach for compressing large language models (LLMs), significantly reducing inference latency. However, conventional training-free structured pruning methods often employ a heuristic metric that…
Long-context inference in large language models is bottlenecked by Key--Value (KV) cache loading during the decoding stage, where the sequential nature of generation requires repeatedly transferring the KV cache from off-chip High-Bandwidth…
Reducing the key-value (KV) cache size is a crucial step toward enabling efficient inference in large language models (LLMs), especially under latency and memory constraints. While Multi-Head Attention (MHA) offers strong representational…