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Related papers: Hardware-Efficient Attention for Fast Decoding

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Our formulation reveals that the reduction across the sequence axis can be efficiently computed in parallel through a tree reduction. Our algorithm, called Tree Attention, for parallelizing exact attention computation across multiple GPUs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Vasudev Shyam , Jonathan Pilault , Emily Shepperd , Quentin Anthony , Beren Millidge

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a pivotal research area, yet the attention module remains a critical bottleneck in LLM inference, even with techniques like KVCache to mitigate redundant computations. While various top-$k$…

Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive performance in generative tasks but also introduce significant challenges in real-world serving due to inefficient use of the expensive, computation-optimized accelerators.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-11 Shaoyuan Chen , Wencong Xiao , Yutong Lin , Mingxing Zhang , Yingdi Shan , Jinlei Jiang , Kang Chen , Yongwei Wu

Large reasoning models (LRMs) achieve state-of-the-art performance on challenging benchmarks by generating long chains of intermediate steps, but their inference cost is dominated by decoding, where each new token must attend to the entire…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Hossein Entezari Zarch , Lei Gao , Chaoyi Jiang , Murali Annavaram

Linear attention Transformers and their gated variants, celebrated for enabling parallel training and efficient recurrent inference, still fall short in recall-intensive tasks compared to traditional Transformers and demand significant…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Yu Zhang , Songlin Yang , Ruijie Zhu , Yue Zhang , Leyang Cui , Yiqiao Wang , Bolun Wang , Freda Shi , Bailin Wang , Wei Bi , Peng Zhou , Guohong Fu

Edge acceleration for large language models is crucial for their widespread application; however, achieving fast attention inference and efficient decoding on resource-constrained edge accelerators remains challenging. This paper presents…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2026-01-19 Junming Zhang , Qinyan Zhang , Huajun Sun , Feiyang Gao , Sheng Hu , Rui Nie , Xiangshui Miao

This study introduces bifurcated attention, a method designed to enhance language model inference in shared-context batch decoding scenarios. Our approach addresses the challenge of redundant memory IO costs, a critical factor contributing…

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Vinay Joshi , Prashant Laddha , Shambhavi Sinha , Om Ji Omer , Sreenivas Subramoney

As large language models (LLMs) and visual language models (VLMs) grow in scale and application, attention mechanisms have become a central computational bottleneck due to their high memory and time complexity. While many efficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-11 Zhengyu Tian , Anantha Padmanaban Krishna Kumar , Hemant Krishnakumar , Reza Rawassizadeh

Cost of serving large language models (LLM) is high, but the expensive and scarce GPUs are poorly efficient when generating tokens sequentially, unless the batch of sequences is enlarged. However, the batch size is limited by some…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Jiaao He , Jidong Zhai

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly employed for complex tasks that process multiple generation calls in a tree structure with shared prefixes of tokens, including few-shot prompting, multi-step reasoning, speculative decoding,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-10 Jinwei Yao , Kaiqi Chen , Kexun Zhang , Jiaxuan You , Binhang Yuan , Zeke Wang , Tao Lin

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Yuxuan Hu , Jianchao Tan , Jiaqi Zhang , Wen Zan , Pingwei Sun , Yifan Lu , Yerui Sun , Yuchen Xie , Xunliang Cai , Jing Zhang

The quadratic computational complexity of standard attention mechanisms presents a severe scalability bottleneck for LLMs in long-context scenarios. While hybrid attention mechanisms combining Full Attention (FA) and Sparse Attention (SA)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Quantong Qiu , Zhiyi Hong , Yi Yang , Haitian Wang , Kebin Liu , Qingqing Dang , Juntao Li , Min Zhang

Linear attention methods offer a compelling alternative to softmax attention due to their efficiency in recurrent decoding. Recent research has focused on enhancing standard linear attention by incorporating gating while retaining its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Yingcong Li , Davoud Ataee Tarzanagh , Ankit Singh Rawat , Maryam Fazel , Samet Oymak

LLM serving is increasingly dominated by decode attention, which is a memory-bound operation due to massive KV cache loading from global memory. Meanwhile, real-world workloads exhibit substantial, hierarchical shared prefixes across…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Jinjun Yi , Zhixin Zhao , Yitao Hu , Ke Yan , Weiwei Sun , Hao Wang , Laiping Zhao , Yuhao Zhang , Wenxin Li , Keqiu Li

We present the first comprehensive study of latent multi-head attention (MLA) for small language models, revealing interesting efficiency-quality trade-offs. Training 30M-parameter GPT models on 100,000 synthetic stories, we benchmark three…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Sushant Mehta , Raj Dandekar , Rajat Dandekar , Sreedath Panat

Deploying long-context large language models (LLMs) is essential but poses significant computational and memory challenges. Caching all Key and Value (KV) states across all attention heads consumes substantial memory. Existing KV cache…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Guangxuan Xiao , Jiaming Tang , Jingwei Zuo , Junxian Guo , Shang Yang , Haotian Tang , Yao Fu , Song Han

Large language models encounter critical GPU memory capacity constraints during long-context inference, where KV cache memory consumption severely limits decode batch sizes. While existing research has explored offloading KV cache to DRAM,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Qiuyang Zhang , Kai Zhou , Ding Tang , Kai Lu , Cheng Li , Zhenyu Yang , Peng Xu , Jiguang Wan

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance across diverse natural language processing tasks. However, as the model size and the input sequence's length increase, the linearly increasing key-value (KV) cache…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Qingyun Jin , Xiaohui Song , Feng Zhou , Zengchang Qin

The proliferation of long-context large language models (LLMs) exposes a key bottleneck: the rapidly expanding key-value cache during decoding, which imposes heavy memory and latency costs. While recent approaches attempt to alleviate this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Gang Lin , Dongfang Li , Zhuoen Chen , Yukun Shi , Xuhui Chen , Baotian Hu , Min Zhang