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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) significantly reduces KVCache memory usage in Large Language Models while introducing substantial computational overhead and intermediate variable expansion. This poses challenges for efficient hardware…
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…
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,…
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…
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.…
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), the attention used in DeepSeek-V2/V3, jointly compresses keys and values into a low-rank latent and matches the H100 roofline almost perfectly. Its trained weights, however, expose only one decoding path -…
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…
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)…
Linear RNNs with gating recently demonstrated competitive performance compared to Transformers in language modeling. Although their linear compute scaling in sequence length offers theoretical runtime advantages over Transformers, realizing…
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…
Recent advance in sparse attention mechanisms has demonstrated strong potential for reducing the computational cost of long-context training and inference in large language models (LLMs). Native Sparse Attention (NSA), one state-of-the-art…
While FP8 attention has shown substantial promise in innovations like FlashAttention-3, its integration into the decoding phase of the DeepSeek Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) architecture presents notable challenges. These challenges…
Attention mechanisms underpin the success of large language models (LLMs), yet their substantial computational and memory overhead poses challenges for optimizing efficiency and performance. A critical bottleneck arises as KV cache and…
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…
Transformers excel at sequence modeling but face quadratic complexity, while linear attention offers improved efficiency but often compromises recall accuracy over long contexts. In this work, we introduce Native Hybrid Attention (NHA), a…
The Attention module finds common usage in language modeling, presenting distinct challenges within the broader scope of Natural Language Processing. Multi-Head Attention (MHA) employs an absolute positional encoding, which imposes…
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…
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.…