Related papers: Optimizing Mixture of Block Attention
Scaling the effective context length is essential for advancing large language models (LLMs) toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). However, the quadratic increase in computational complexity inherent in traditional attention…
Scaling depth is a key driver for large language models (LLMs). Yet, as LLMs become deeper, they often suffer from signal degradation: informative features formed in shallow layers are gradually diluted by repeated residual updates, making…
The quadratic complexity of full attention mechanisms poses a significant bottleneck for Video Diffusion Models (VDMs) aiming to generate long-duration, high-resolution videos. While various sparse attention methods have been proposed, many…
Sliding-window attention offers a hardware-efficient solution to the memory and throughput challenges of Large Language Models (LLMs) in long-context scenarios. Existing methods typically employ a single window length across all attention…
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…
Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) is a common practice to adapt pre-trained models for specific applications. While methods like LoRA have effectively addressed GPU memory constraints during fine-tuning, their performance often falls…
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…
As large language models (LLMs) and visual language models (VLMs) grow in scale and application, attention mechanisms have become a central computational bottleneck due to their high memory and time complexity. While many efficient…
Modern large language models increasingly require long contexts for reasoning and multi-document tasks, but attention's quadratic complexity creates a severe computational bottleneck. We present Block-Sparse FlashAttention (BSFA), a drop-in…
The choice of attention mechanism in Transformer models involves a critical trade-off between modeling quality and inference efficiency. Multi-Head Attention (MHA) offers the best quality but suffers from large Key-Value (KV) cache memory…
The attention operator remains a critical performance bottleneck in large language models (LLMs), particularly for long-context scenarios. While FlashAttention is the most widely used and effective GPU-aware acceleration algorithm, it must…
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…
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)…
The growth in the number of parameters of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to a significant surge in computational requirements, making them challenging and costly to deploy. Speculative decoding (SD) leverages smaller models to…
Recent advances in large language models highlighted the excessive quadratic cost of self-attention. Despite the significant research efforts, subquadratic attention methods still suffer from inferior performance in practice. We hypothesize…
As long-context language modeling becomes increasingly important, the cost of maintaining and attending to large Key/Value (KV) caches grows rapidly, becoming a major bottleneck in both training and inference. While prior works such as…
Multi-Head Attention (MHA) is a critical computational kernel in transformer-based AI models. Emerging scalable tile-based accelerator architectures integrate increasing numbers of tightly-packed processing elements (PEs) with tensor units.…
The escalating context length in Large Language Models (LLMs) creates a severe performance bottleneck around the Key-Value (KV) cache, whose memory-bound nature leads to significant GPU under-utilization. This paper introduces Mixture of…
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…
The evolution of large language models (LLMs) towards applications with ultra-long contexts faces challenges posed by the high computational and memory costs of the Transformer architecture. While existing sparse and linear attention…