Related papers: Hardware-Efficient Attention for Fast Decoding

Long contexts improve capabilities of large language models but pose serious hardware challenges: compute and memory footprints grow linearly with sequence length. Particularly, the decoding phase continuously accesses massive KV cache,…

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…

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…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained popularity in recent years, driving up the demand for inference. LLM inference is composed of two phases with distinct characteristics: a compute-bound prefill phase followed by a memory-bound decode…

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…

Long-context Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) that incorporate long text-image and text-video modalities, demand substantial resources as their multimodal Key-Value (KV) caches grow with increasing input lengths, challenging…

We introduce Glinthawk, an architecture for offline Large Language Model (LLM) inference. By leveraging a two-tiered structure, Glinthawk optimizes the utilization of the high-end accelerators ("Tier 1") by offloading the attention…

The rise of disaggregated AI GPUs has exposed a critical bottleneck in large-scale attention workloads: non-uniform memory access (NUMA). As multi-chiplet designs become the norm for scaling compute capabilities, memory latency and…

As the demand for long-context large language models (LLMs) increases, models with context windows of up to 128K or 1M tokens are becoming increasingly prevalent. However, long-context LLM inference is challenging since the inference speed…

During LLM inference, KVCache memory usage grows linearly with sequence length and batch size and often exceeds GPU capacity. Recent proposals offload KV states to host memory and reduce transfers using top-k attention. But their…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance across diverse domains but remain inefficient during the autoregressive decoding phase. Unlike the prefill stage, which employs compute-bound GEMM operations, decoding…

The Transformer architecture has revolutionized deep learning through its Self-Attention mechanism, which effectively captures contextual information. However, the memory footprint of Self-Attention presents significant challenges for…

When transformer-based language models are deployed for text generation, most of the inference time is spent in the decoding stage, where output tokens are generated sequentially. Reducing the hardware cost of each decoding step is…

The quadratic computational complexity of the attention mechanism in current Large Language Models (LLMs) renders inference with long contexts prohibitively expensive. To address this challenge, various approaches aim to retain critical…

Linear attention reduces the quadratic cost of softmax attention to $\mathcal{O}(T)$, but its memory state grows as $\mathcal{O}(T)$ in Frobenius norm, causing progressive interference between stored associations. We introduce…

The auto-regressive decoding of Large Language Models (LLMs) results in significant overheads in their hardware performance. While recent research has investigated various speculative decoding techniques for multi-token generation, these…

Serving long-context LLMs is costly because attention computation grows linearly with context length. Dynamic sparse attention algorithms (DSAs) mitigate this by attending only to the key-value (KV) cache of critical tokens. However, with…

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive abilities in various domains while the inference cost is expensive. Many previous studies exploit quantization methods to reduce LLM inference cost by reducing latency and memory…

Large Language Model (LLM) serving is increasingly constrained by the growing size of the key-value (KV) cache, which scales with both context length and generation length. Prior work shows that attention is dominated by a small subset of…

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…