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Computational workloads composing traditional transformer models are starkly bifurcated. Multi-Head Attention (MHA) and Grouped-Query Attention are memory-bound due to low arithmetic intensity, while FeedForward Networks are compute-bound.…
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…
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…
Multi-head latent attention (MLA) is designed to optimize KV cache memory through low-rank key-value joint compression. Rather than caching keys and values separately, MLA stores their compressed latent representations, reducing memory…
Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) is an innovative architecture proposed by DeepSeek, designed to ensure efficient and economical inference by significantly compressing the Key-Value (KV) cache into a latent vector. Compared to MLA,…
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…
Multi-Head Attention (MHA) is the core computational primitive underlying modern Large Language Models (LLMs). However, MHA suffers from a fundamental linear scaling limitation: $H$ attention heads produce exactly $H$ independent attention…
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:…
Scaling pre-trained language models has resulted in large performance gains in various natural language processing tasks but comes with a large cost in memory requirements. Inspired by the position embeddings in transformers, we aim to…
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-Head Latent Attention (MLA), introduced in DeepSeek-V2, improves the efficiency of large language models by projecting query, key, and value tensors into a compact latent space. This architectural change reduces the KV-cache size and…
Multi-Head Latent Attention (MLA) is a recent attention mechanism adopted in state-of-the-art LLMs such as DeepSeek-v3 and Kimi K2. Thanks to its novel formulation, MLA allows two functionally equivalent but computationally distinct kernel…
While the Self-Attention mechanism in the Transformer model has proven to be effective in many domains, we observe that it is less effective in more diverse settings (e.g. multimodality) due to the varying granularity of each token and the…
Multi-Head Latent Attention (MLA), introduced in DeepSeek-V2, compresses key-value states into a low-rank latent vector, caching only this vector to reduce memory. In tensor parallelism (TP), however, attention heads are computed across…
Transformers with linear attention allow for efficient parallel training but can simultaneously be formulated as an RNN with 2D (matrix-valued) hidden states, thus enjoying linear-time inference complexity. However, linear attention…
As vision-language models (VLMs) tackle increasingly complex and multimodal tasks, the rapid growth of Key-Value (KV) cache imposes significant memory and computational bottlenecks during inference. While Multi-Head Latent Attention (MLA)…
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…
As long-context language modeling becomes increasingly important, the cost of maintaining and attending to large Key/Value (KV) caches grows rapidly, becoming a major bottleneck in both training and inference. While prior works such as…
Long-rollout causal video diffusion has converged on a fixed-size sliding-window KV cache, with recent progress innovating within this layout by changing which tokens occupy the window or how their positions are encoded. The per-head KV…
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,…