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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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Keqi Deng , Philip C. Woodland

Multi-Head Attention (MHA) is a key component of Transformer. In MHA, attention heads work independently, causing problems such as low-rank bottleneck of attention score matrices and head redundancy. We propose Dynamically Composable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Da Xiao , Qingye Meng , Shengping Li , Xingyuan Yuan

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly support multilingual understanding and generation. Meanwhile, efforts to interpret their internal mechanisms have emerged, offering insights to enhance multilingual performance. While multi-head…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Xin Liu , Qiyang Song , Qihang Zhou , Haichao Du , Shaowen Xu , Wenbo Jiang , Weijuan Zhang , Xiaoqi Jia

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-08-08 Herman Sugiharto , Aradea , Husni Mubarok

The attention mechanism forms the foundational blocks for transformer language models. Recent approaches show that scaling the model achieves human-level performance. However, with increasing demands for scaling and constraints on hardware…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-16 Sai Sena Chinnakonduru , Astarag Mohapatra

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Zhen Cheng , Hao-Bo Yang , Wan-Yi Huang , Jin-Long Li

Vision Transformers have made remarkable progress in recent years, achieving state-of-the-art performance in most vision tasks. A key component of this success is due to the introduction of the Multi-Head Self-Attention (MHSA) module, which…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Tianxiao Zhang , Bo Luo , Guanghui Wang

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…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Kewei Zhang , Ye Huang , Yufan Deng , Jincheng Yu , Junsong Chen , Huan Ling , Enze Xie , Daquan Zhou

Simultaneous machine translation models start generating a target sequence before they have encoded or read the source sequence. Recent approaches for this task either apply a fixed policy on a state-of-the art Transformer model, or a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-09-30 Xutai Ma , Juan Pino , James Cross , Liezl Puzon , Jiatao Gu

Attention is a powerful and ubiquitous mechanism for allowing neural models to focus on particular salient pieces of information by taking their weighted average when making predictions. In particular, multi-headed attention is a driving…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-11-05 Paul Michel , Omer Levy , Graham Neubig

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Zhengge Cai , Haowen Hou

Attention mechanisms have demonstrated significant potential in enhancing learning models by identifying key portions of input data, particularly in scenarios with limited training samples. Inspired by human perception, we propose that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Bahareh Nikpour , Narges Armanfard

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-24 Luoyang Sun , Cheng Deng , Jiwen Jiang , Xinjian Wu , Haifeng Zhang , Lei Chen , Lionel Ni , Jun Wang

Multi-head, key-value attention is the backbone of the widely successful Transformer model and its variants. This attention mechanism uses multiple parallel key-value attention blocks (called heads), each performing two fundamental…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Sarthak Mittal , Sharath Chandra Raparthy , Irina Rish , Yoshua Bengio , Guillaume Lajoie

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.…

Multi-query attention (MQA), which only uses a single key-value head, drastically speeds up decoder inference. However, MQA can lead to quality degradation, and moreover it may not be desirable to train a separate model just for faster…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-27 Joshua Ainslie , James Lee-Thorp , Michiel de Jong , Yury Zemlyanskiy , Federico Lebrón , Sumit Sanghai

We propose Hymba, a family of small language models featuring a hybrid-head parallel architecture that integrates transformer attention mechanisms with state space models (SSMs) for enhanced efficiency. Attention heads provide…

Attention layers are widely used in natural language processing (NLP) and are beginning to influence computer vision architectures. Training very large transformer models allowed significant improvement in both fields, but once trained,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-21 Jean-Baptiste Cordonnier , Andreas Loukas , Martin Jaggi

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,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Nandan Kumar Jha , Brandon Reagen

Transformer models rely on self-attention to capture token dependencies but face challenges in effectively integrating positional information while allowing multi-head attention (MHA) flexibility. Prior methods often model semantic and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Jintian Shao , Hongyi Huang , Jiayi Wu , Beiwen Zhang , ZhiYu Wu , You Shan , MingKai Zheng