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Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used in generative applications such as chatting, code generation, and reasoning. However, many realworld workloads such as classification, question answering, recommendation, and text embedding rely…

FlashAttention (Dao, 2023) effectively reduces the quadratic peak memory usage to linear in training transformer-based large language models (LLMs) on a single GPU. In this paper, we introduce DISTFLASHATTN, a distributed memory-efficient…

A practical large language model (LLM) service may involve a long system prompt, which specifies the instructions, examples, and knowledge documents of the task and is reused across requests. However, the long system prompt causes…

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) set the state of the art in visual generation, yet their quadratic self-attention cost fundamentally limits scaling to long token sequences. Recent Top-K sparse attention approaches reduce the computation of…

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:…

While diffusion language models (DLMs) offer a promising alternative to autoregressive models (ARs), existing open-source DLMs suffer from high inference latency. This bottleneck is mainly due to the attention's quadratic complexity with…

The quadratic computational complexity of standard attention mechanisms presents a severe scalability bottleneck for LLMs in long-context scenarios. While hybrid attention mechanisms combining Full Attention (FA) and Sparse Attention (SA)…

Performance prediction is a method to estimate the performance of Language Models (LMs) on various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, mitigating computational costs associated with model capacity and data for fine-tuning. Our paper…

Large vision-language models (VLMs) enable joint processing of text and images. However, incorporating vision data significantly increases the prompt length, resulting in a longer time to first token (TTFT). This bottleneck can be…

Large reasoning models (LRMs) achieve state-of-the-art performance on challenging benchmarks by generating long chains of intermediate steps, but their inference cost is dominated by decoding, where each new token must attend to the entire…

Leveraging attention sparsity to accelerate long-context large language models (LLMs) has been a hot research topic. However, current algorithms such as sparse attention or key-value (KV) cache compression tend to use a fixed budget, which…

State-of-the-art sparse attention methods for reducing decoding latency fall into two main categories: approximate top-$k$ (and its extension, top-$p$) and recently introduced sampling-based estimation. However, these approaches are…

While sparse attention mitigates the computational bottleneck of long-context LLM training, its distributed training process exhibits extreme heterogeneity in both \textit{1)} sequence length and \textit{2)} sparsity sensitivity, leading to…

Long-context inference in LLMs faces the dual challenges of quadratic attention complexity and prohibitive KV cache memory. While token-level sparse attention offers superior accuracy, its indexing overhead is costly; block-level methods…

Large reasoning models achieve strong performance through test-time scaling, but this incurs substantial computational overhead due to long decoding from short prompts. While sparse attention can reduce latency and memory usage, existing…

As Large Language Models (LLMs) scale to million-token contexts, traditional Mechanistic Interpretability techniques for analyzing attention scale quadratically with context length, demanding terabytes of memory beyond 100,000 tokens. We…

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…

Self-attention based Transformer has demonstrated the state-of-the-art performances in a number of natural language processing tasks. Self-attention is able to model long-term dependencies, but it may suffer from the extraction of…

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance in numerous domains but often struggle to process lengthy inputs effectively and efficiently due to limited length generalization and attention's quadratic computational…

Understanding how Large Language Models (LLMs) process information from prompts remains a significant challenge. To shed light on this "black box," attention visualization techniques have been developed to capture neuron-level perceptions…