Related papers: FLASH-D: FlashAttention with Hidden Softmax Divisi…
Sparse attention has been proposed as a way to alleviate the quadratic cost of transformers, a central bottleneck in long-context training. A promising line of work is $\alpha$-entmax attention, a differentiable sparse alternative to…
Current high-resolution vision-language models encode images as high-resolution image tokens and exhaustively take all these tokens to compute attention, which significantly increases the computational cost. To address this problem, we…
Attention is a core operation in large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs). We present BD Attention (BDA), the first lossless algorithmic reformulation of attention. BDA is enabled by a simple matrix identity from Basis…
Since its introduction, softmax attention has become the backbone of modern transformer architectures due to its expressiveness and scalability across a wide range of tasks. However, the main drawback of softmax attention is the quadratic…
The attention operator remains a critical performance bottleneck in large language models (LLMs), particularly for long-context scenarios. While FlashAttention is the most widely used and effective GPU-aware acceleration algorithm, it must…
Linear attention is an efficient attention mechanism that has recently emerged as a promising alternative to conventional softmax attention. With its ability to process tokens in linear computational complexities, linear attention, in…
PagedAttention is a popular approach for dynamic memory allocation in LLM serving systems. It enables on-demand allocation of GPU memory to mitigate KV cache fragmentation -- a phenomenon that crippled the batch size (and consequently…
The softmax content-based attention mechanism has proven to be very beneficial in many applications of recurrent neural networks. Nevertheless it suffers from two major computational limitations. First, its computations for an attention…
There has been a rapid advance of custom hardware (HW) for accelerating the inference speed of deep neural networks (DNNs). Previously, the softmax layer was not a main concern of DNN accelerating HW, because its portion is relatively small…
An essential component of modern recurrent sequence models is the forget gate. While Transformers do not have an explicit recurrent form, we show that a forget gate can be naturally incorporated into Transformers by down-weighting the…
Vision transformers (ViTs) have pushed the state-of-the-art for various visual recognition tasks by patch-wise image tokenization followed by self-attention. However, the employment of self-attention modules results in a quadratic…
Transformer-based deep learning models are increasingly deployed on energy, and DRAM bandwidth constrained devices such as laptops and gaming consoles, which presents significant challenges in meeting the latency requirements of the models.…
Widely adopted in modern Vision Transformer designs, Softmax attention can effectively capture long-range visual information; however, it incurs excessive computational cost when dealing with high-resolution inputs. In contrast, linear…
Leveraging long contexts is crucial for advanced AI systems, but attention computation poses a scalability challenge. While scaled dot-product attention (SDPA) exhibits token sparsity, i.e. only a few pivotal tokens significantly contribute…
Transformer models have revolutionized natural language processing, achieving state-of-the-art performance and demonstrating remarkable scalability. However, their memory demands, particularly due to maintaining full context in memory, pose…
Recent advances in video diffusion models have shifted towards transformer-based architectures, achieving state-of-the-art video generation but at the cost of quadratic attention complexity, which severely limits scalability for longer…
Efficient attention algorithms are critical to mitigate the quadratic cost of attention in long-context workloads. Prior work utilises block-scaled quantisation techniques on Blackwell GPUs to move attention computation to 4-bit precision…
Transformer networks have emerged as the state-of-the-art approach for natural language processing tasks and are gaining popularity in other domains such as computer vision and audio processing. However, the efficient hardware acceleration…
Diffusion Transformers (DiT) have become the de-facto model for generating high-quality visual content like videos and images. A huge bottleneck is the attention mechanism where complexity scales quadratically with resolution and video…
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,…