Related papers: Top-Theta Attention: Sparsifying Transformers by C…
Transformer-based models have achieved dominant performance in numerous NLP tasks. Despite their remarkable successes, pre-trained transformers such as BERT suffer from a computationally expensive self-attention mechanism that interacts…
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…
Efficient Transformers have been developed for long sequence modeling, due to their subquadratic memory and time complexity. Sparse Transformer is a popular approach to improving the efficiency of Transformers by restricting self-attention…
A new line of research for feature selection based on neural networks has recently emerged. Despite its superiority to classical methods, it requires many training iterations to converge and detect informative features. The computational…
Attention matrices are fundamental to transformer research, supporting a broad range of applications including interpretability, visualization, manipulation, and distillation. Yet, most existing analyses focus on individual attention heads…
Attention is sparse in vision transformers. We observe the final prediction in vision transformers is only based on a subset of most informative tokens, which is sufficient for accurate image recognition. Based on this observation, we…
In this paper, we propose an extension to Longformer Encoder-Decoder, a popular sparse transformer architecture. One common challenge with sparse transformers is that they can struggle with encoding of long range context, such as…
In this paper, we propose a novel token selective attention approach, ToSA, which can identify tokens that need to be attended as well as those that can skip a transformer layer. More specifically, a token selector parses the current…
The key-value (KV) cache in transformer models is a critical component for efficient decoding or inference, yet its memory demands scale poorly with sequence length, posing a major challenge for scalable deployment of large language models.…
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,…
Transformer models are computationally costly on long sequences since regular attention has quadratic $O(n^2)$ time complexity. We introduce Wavelet-Enhanced Random Spectral Attention (WERSA), a novel mechanism of linear $O(n)$ time…
Recent diffusion models enable high-quality video generation, but suffer from slow runtimes. The large transformer-based backbones used in these models are bottlenecked by spatiotemporal attention. In this paper, we identify that a…
The Transformer translation model is based on the multi-head attention mechanism, which can be parallelized easily. The multi-head attention network performs the scaled dot-product attention function in parallel, empowering the model by…
Efficient inference on GPUs using large language models remains challenging due to memory bandwidth limitations, particularly during data transfers between High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) and SRAM in attention computations. Approximate…
Linear-attention models that compress the entire input sequence into a fixed-size recurrent state offer an efficient alternative to Transformers, but their finite memory induces forgetfulness that harms retrieval-intensive tasks. To…
As long-context inference becomes central to large language models (LLMs), attention over growing key-value caches emerges as a dominant decoding bottleneck, motivating sparse attention for scalable inference. Fixed-budget top-k sparse…
The computational burden of attention in long-context language models has motivated two largely independent lines of work: sparse attention mechanisms that reduce complexity by attending to selected tokens, and gated attention variants that…
Transformer plays a central role in many fundamental deep learning models, e.g., the ViT in computer vision and the BERT and GPT in natural language processing, whose effectiveness is mainly attributed to its multi-head attention (MHA)…
The training and generalization dynamics of the Transformer's core mechanism, namely the Attention mechanism, remain under-explored. Besides, existing analyses primarily focus on single-head attention. Inspired by the demonstrated benefits…
While transformers have begun to dominate many tasks in vision, applying them to large images is still computationally difficult. A large reason for this is that self-attention scales quadratically with the number of tokens, which in turn,…