Related papers: Latent Multi-Head Attention for Small Language Mod…
This study investigates small-scale pretraining for Small Language Models (SLMs) to enable efficient use of limited data and compute, improve accessibility in low-resource settings and reduce costs. To enhance long-context extrapolation in…
Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) significantly reduces KVCache memory usage in Large Language Models while introducing substantial computational overhead and intermediate variable expansion. This poses challenges for efficient hardware…
Running Large Language Models (LLMs) on edge devices is constrained by high compute and memory demands posing a barrier for real-time applications in sectors like healthcare, education, and embedded systems. Current solutions such as…
Transformer has become ubiquitous in natural language processing (e.g., machine translation, question answering); however, it requires enormous amount of computations to achieve high performance, which makes it not suitable for mobile…
Slim attention shrinks the context memory size by 2x for transformer models with MHA (multi-head attention), which can speed up inference by up to 2x for large context windows. Slim attention is an exact, mathematically identical…
While the Transformer architecture dominates many fields, its quadratic self-attention complexity hinders its use in large-scale applications. Linear attention offers an efficient alternative, but its direct application often degrades…
Various natural language processing (NLP) tasks necessitate models that are efficient and small based on their ultimate application at the edge or in other resource-constrained environments. While prior research has reduced the size of…
Multimodal Transformers serve as the backbone for state-of-the-art vision-language models, yet their quadratic attention complexity remains a critical barrier to scalability. In this work, we investigate the viability of Linear Attention…
Local-global attention models have recently emerged as compelling alternatives to standard Transformers, promising improvements in both training and inference efficiency. However, the crucial choice of window size presents a Pareto…
The full-size MLPs and the projection layers in attention introduce tremendous model sizes of large language models (LLMs), consuming extensive computational resources in pre-training. We empirically observe that the activations of…
Scaling depth is a key driver for large language models (LLMs). Yet, as LLMs become deeper, they often suffer from signal degradation: informative features formed in shallow layers are gradually diluted by repeated residual updates, making…
As the core operator of Transformers, Softmax Attention exhibits excellent global modeling capabilities. However, its quadratic complexity limits its applicability to vision tasks. In contrast, Linear Attention shares a similar formulation…
The per-token cost of transformer inference scales with context length, preventing its application to lifelong in-context learning. Linear attention is an efficient alternative that maintains a constant memory footprint, even on infinite…
Training and serving long-context large language models (LLMs) incurs substantial overhead. To address this, two critical steps are often required: a pretrained LLM typically undergoes a separate stage for context length extension by…
Large Language Models (LLMs) such as LLaMA and DeepSeek, are built on transformer architectures, which have become a standard model for achieving state-of-the-art performance in natural language processing tasks. Recently, there has been…
Mixture of Block Attention (MoBA) (Lu et al., 2025) is a promising building block for efficiently processing long contexts in LLMs by enabling queries to sparsely attend to a small subset of key-value blocks, drastically reducing…
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are commonly derived by extending pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) with visual capabilities. In this work, we investigate how MLLMs process visual inputs by analyzing their attention…
We present a systematic empirical study of small language models under strict compute constraints, analyzing how architectural choices and training budget interact to determine performance. Starting from a linear next-token predictor, we…
Efficient inference of Multi-Head Latent Attention (MLA) is challenged by deploying the DeepSeek-R1 671B model on a single Multi-GPU server. This paper introduces FlashMLA-ETAP, a novel framework that enhances MLA inference for the…
Looped Transformers (LT) have emerged as a powerful architecture by iterating their layers multiple times before decoding the final token. However, pairing them with full attention retains quadratic complexity, making them computationally…