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Language models struggle to generalize beyond pretraining context lengths, limiting long-horizon reasoning and retrieval. Continued pretraining on long-context data can help but is expensive due to the quadratic scaling of Attention. We…

Softmax can become a computational bottleneck in the Transformer model's Multi-Head Attention (MHA) block, particularly in small models under low-precision inference, where exponentiation and normalization incur significant overhead. As…

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…

Transformer-based language models have found many diverse applications requiring them to process sequences of increasing length. For these applications, the causal self-attention -- which is the only component scaling quadratically w.r.t.…

Current high-resolution vision-language models encode images as high-resolution image tokens and exhaustively take all these tokens to compute attention, which significantly increases the computational cost. To address this problem, we…

Long-context decoding in LLMs is IO-bound: each token re-reads an ever-growing KV cache. Prior accelerations cut bytes via compression, which lowers fidelity, or selection/eviction, which restricts what remains accessible, and both can…

The quadratic cost of softmax attention limits Transformer scalability in high-resolution vision. We introduce Infinite Self-Attention (InfSA), a spectral reformulation that treats each attention layer as a diffusion step on a…

We introduce SeerAttention-R, a sparse attention framework specifically tailored for the long decoding of reasoning models. Extended from SeerAttention, SeerAttention-R retains the design of learning attention sparsity through a…

The quadratic complexity of standard attention mechanisms poses a significant scalability bottleneck for large language models (LLMs) in long-context scenarios. While hybrid attention strategies that combine sparse and full attention within…

Leveraging long contexts is crucial for advanced AI systems, but attention computation poses a scalability challenge. While scaled dot-product attention (SDPA) exhibits token sparsity, i.e. only a few pivotal tokens significantly contribute…

Training stable biological foundation models requires rethinking attention mechanisms: we find that using sigmoid attention as a drop in replacement for softmax attention a) produces better learned representations: on six diverse…

Since its introduction, softmax attention has become the backbone of modern transformer architectures due to its expressiveness and scalability across a wide range of tasks. However, the main drawback of softmax attention is the quadratic…

Training and serving long-context large language models (LLMs) incurs substantial overhead. To address this, two critical steps are often required: a pretrained LLM typically undergoes a separate stage for context length extension by…

Large Language Models (LLMs) face efficiency bottlenecks due to the quadratic complexity of the attention mechanism when processing long contexts. Sparse attention methods offer a promising solution, but existing approaches often suffer…

Transformers are state-of-the-art models for a variety of sequence modeling tasks. At their core is an attention function which models pairwise interactions between the inputs at every timestep. While attention is powerful, it does not…

Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) have become increasingly important. However, due to the quadratic time complexity of attention computation, scaling LLMs to longer contexts incurs extremely slow inference speed and high GPU…

Transformer architectures have achieved remarkable success in various domains. While efficient alternatives to Softmax Attention have been widely studied, the search for more expressive mechanisms grounded in theoretical insight-even at…

When implementations of the Transformer's self-attention layer utilize SRAM instead of DRAM, they can achieve significant speedups. The Tenstorrent Grayskull architecture provides a large SRAM, distributed across a grid of cores. This work…

We present core attention disaggregation (CAD), a technique that improves long-context large language model training by decoupling the core attention computation, softmax(QK^T)V, from the rest of the model and executing it on a separate…

FlashAttention series has been widely applied in the inference of large language models (LLMs). However, FlashAttention series only supports the high-level GPU architectures, e.g., Ampere and Hopper. At present, FlashAttention series is not…