Related papers: Rethinking LLM Inference Bottlenecks: Insights fro…

In this work, we study how multi-head latent attention (MLA), a popular strategy for compressing key/value memory, affects a transformer's internal capacity during pretraining. Using a lightweight suite of Marchenko-Pastur (MP) diagnostics,…

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 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,…

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) networks have been proposed as an efficient way to scale up model capacity and implement conditional computing. However, the study of MoE components mostly focused on the feedforward layer in Transformer…

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…

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…

The vanilla self-attention mechanism in Transformers can be viewed as a two-layer fast-weight MLP, whose weights are dynamically induced by inputs and whose hidden dimension is equal to the sequence length $N$. As the context extends, the…

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…

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures are often considered a natural fit for continual learning because sparse routing should localize updates and reduce interference, yet MoE Transformers still forget substantially even with sparse,…

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…

We present MoE-MLA-RoPE, a novel architecture combination that combines Mixture of Experts (MoE) with Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) and Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE) for efficient language modeling. Our approach addresses the…

Transformers have dominated sequence processing tasks for the past seven years -- most notably language modeling. However, the inherent quadratic complexity of their attention mechanism remains a significant bottleneck as context length…

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…

The transformer has revolutionized modern AI across language, vision, and beyond. It consists of $L$ layers, each running $H$ attention heads in parallel and feeding the combined output to the subsequent layer. In attention, the input…

In this work, we upgrade the multi-head attention mechanism, the core of the Transformer model, to improve efficiency while maintaining or surpassing the previous accuracy level. We show that multi-head attention can be expressed in the…

Despite many recent works on Mixture of Experts (MoEs) for resource-efficient Transformer language models, existing methods mostly focus on MoEs for feedforward layers. Previous attempts at extending MoE to the self-attention layer fail to…

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced generative applications in natural language processing (NLP). Recent trends in model architectures revolve around efficient variants of transformers or state-space/gated-recurrent…

Multi-head self-attention (MHSA) is a key component of Transformers, a widely popular architecture in both language and vision. Multiple heads intuitively enable different parallel processes over the same input. Yet, they also obscure the…

Transformer models face scalability challenges in causal language modeling (CLM) due to inefficient memory allocation for growing key-value (KV) caches, which strains compute and storage resources. Existing methods like Grouped Query…

Key-Value (KV) cache memory and bandwidth increasingly dominate large language model inference cost in long-context and long-generation regimes. Architectures such as multi-head latent attention (MLA) and hybrid sliding-window attention…