Related papers: Multi-head Temporal Latent Attention
Transformers have become central to natural language processing and large language models, but their deployment at scale faces three major challenges. First, the attention mechanism requires massive matrix multiplications and frequent…
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 -…
Autoregressive Transformers rely on Key-Value (KV) caching to accelerate inference. However, the linear growth of the KV cache with context length leads to excessive memory consumption and bandwidth constraints. This bottleneck is…
Large Language Models struggle with memory demands from the growing Key-Value (KV) cache as context lengths increase. Existing compression methods homogenize head dimensions or rely on attention-guided token pruning, often sacrificing…
Key-Value (KV) cache remains a major bottleneck for deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) in long-generation tasks. Prior work often applies uniform compression across both prefill and decoding caches, but compressing the prefill cache…
Recent work has identified a subset of attention heads in Transformer as retrieval heads, which are responsible for retrieving information from the context. In this work, we first investigate retrieval heads in multilingual contexts. In…
With the rapid development of large language models (LLMs), handling long context has become one of the vital abilities in LLMs. Such long-context ability is accompanied by difficulties in deployment, especially due to the increased…
Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit pronounced memory-bound characteristics during inference due to High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) bandwidth constraints. In this paper, we propose an L2 Cache-oriented asynchronous KV Cache prefetching method…
Huge memory consumption has been a major bottleneck for deploying high-throughput large language models in real-world applications. In addition to the large number of parameters, the key-value (KV) cache for the attention mechanism in the…
Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive performance in long context generation. Extending the context length has disproportionately shifted the memory footprint of LLMs during inference to the key-value cache…
In this work, we conduct a systematic analysis of Native Sparse Attention (NSA) and propose targeted improvements that enhance long-context modeling. A key insight is that alternating between local (sliding-window) and global (compression,…
As modern LLMs support thousands to millions of tokens, KV caches grow to hundreds of gigabytes, stressing memory capacity and bandwidth. Existing solutions, such as KV cache pruning and offloading, alleviate these but underutilize hardware…
More and more evidence has shown that strengthening layer interactions can enhance the representation power of a deep neural network, while self-attention excels at learning interdependencies by retrieving query-activated information.…
While the Self-Attention mechanism in the Transformer model has proven to be effective in many domains, we observe that it is less effective in more diverse settings (e.g. multimodality) due to the varying granularity of each token and the…
Key-Value (KV) caching is a common technique to enhance the computational efficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs), but its memory overhead grows rapidly with input length. Prior work has shown that not all tokens are equally important…
Vision-language models (VLMs) show remarkable performance in multimodal tasks. However, excessively long multimodal inputs lead to oversized Key-Value (KV) caches, resulting in significant memory consumption and I/O bottlenecks. Previous KV…
With the rise of Transformer models in NLP and CV domain, Multi-Head Attention has been proven to be a game-changer. However, its expensive computation poses challenges to the model throughput and efficiency, especially for the long…
Large Language Model (LLM) inference is increasingly constrained by memory bandwidth, with frequent access to the key-value (KV) cache dominating data movement. While attention sparsity reduces some memory traffic, the relevance of past…
Long-context inference in LLMs faces the dual challenges of quadratic attention complexity and prohibitive KV cache memory. While token-level sparse attention offers superior accuracy, its indexing overhead is costly; block-level methods…
Multi-head self-attention forms the core of Transformer networks. However, their quadratically growing complexity with respect to the input sequence length impedes their deployment on resource-constrained edge devices. We address this…