Related papers: GTA: Grouped-head latenT Attention
LLM decoding is bottlenecked for large batches and long contexts by loading the key-value (KV) cache from high-bandwidth memory, which inflates per-token latency, while the sequential nature of decoding limits parallelism. We analyze the…
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-$k$…
While Transformer self-attention offers strong parallelism, the Key-Value (KV) cache grows linearly with sequence length and becomes a bottleneck for inference efficiency. Multi-head latent attention was recently developed to compress the…
Interacting with humans through multi-turn conversations is a fundamental feature of large language models (LLMs). However, existing LLM serving engines executing multi-turn conversations are inefficient due to the need to repeatedly…
Reducing the key-value (KV) cache size is a crucial step toward enabling efficient inference in large language models (LLMs), especially under latency and memory constraints. While Multi-Head Attention (MHA) offers strong representational…
Multi-headed Attention's (MHA) quadratic compute and linearly growing KV-cache make long-context transformers expensive to train and serve. Prior works such as Grouped Query Attention (GQA) and Multi-Latent Attention (MLA) shrink the cache,…
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,…
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…
The efficiency of large language models (LLMs) remains a critical challenge, particularly in contexts where computational resources are limited. Traditional attention mechanisms in these models, while powerful, require significant…
Large language models (LLMs) face significant challenges in processing long contexts due to the linear growth of the key-value (KV) cache and quadratic complexity of self-attention. Existing approaches address these bottlenecks separately:…
Cross-attention is commonly adopted in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for integrating visual information into the language backbone. However, in applications with large visual inputs, such as video understanding, processing a…
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…
Long-context inference in large language models is bottlenecked by Key--Value (KV) cache loading during the decoding stage, where the sequential nature of generation requires repeatedly transferring the KV cache from off-chip High-Bandwidth…
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are plagued by exorbitant inference costs attributable to the profusion of visual tokens within the vision encoder. The redundant visual tokens engenders a substantial computational load and…
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…
The advent of pre-trained large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized various natural language processing tasks. These models predominantly employ an auto-regressive decoding mechanism that utilizes Key-Value (KV) caches to eliminate…
Large Language Models (LLMs) with hundreds of billions of parameters have transformed the field of machine learning. However, serving these models at inference time is both compute and memory intensive, where a single request can require…
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…
Key-value (KV) cache memory management is the primary bottleneck limiting throughput and cost-efficiency in large-scale GPU inference serving. Current systems suffer from three compounding inefficiencies: (1) the absence of unified KV cache…
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…