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Sparse attention, which selectively attends to a subset of tokens in the context was supposed to be efficient. However, its theoretical reduction in FLOPs has rarely translated into wall-clock speed-up over its dense attention counterparts…
In this paper, we demonstrate that an inherent waveform pattern in the attention allocation of large language models (LLMs) significantly affects their performance in tasks demanding a high degree of context awareness, such as utilizing…
Image Transformers show a magnificent success in Image Restoration tasks. Nevertheless, most of transformer-based models are strictly bounded by exorbitant memory occupancy. Our goal is to reduce the memory consumption of Swin Transformer…
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 Transformer architecture has revolutionized deep learning, delivering the state-of-the-art performance in areas such as natural language processing, computer vision, and time series prediction. However, its core component,…
Fine-tuning provides an effective means to specialize pre-trained models for various downstream tasks. However, fine-tuning often incurs high memory overhead, especially for large transformer-based models, such as LLMs. While existing…
Continual Semantic Segmentation (CSS) seeks to incrementally learn to segment novel classes while preserving knowledge of previously encountered ones. Recent advancements in CSS have been largely driven by the adoption of Pre-trained Vision…
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…
Reducing the key-value (KV) cache burden in Large Language Models (LLMs) significantly accelerates inference. Dynamically selecting critical KV caches during decoding helps maintain performance. Existing methods use random linear hashing to…
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…
Large language models (LLMs) have grown beyond the memory capacity of single GPU devices, necessitating quantization techniques for practical deployment. While NF4 (4-bit NormalFloat) quantization enables 4$\times$ memory reduction,…
Attention is a core operation in large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs). We present BD Attention (BDA), the first lossless algorithmic reformulation of attention. BDA is enabled by a simple matrix identity from Basis…
High throughput serving of large language models (LLMs) requires batching sufficiently many requests at a time. However, existing systems struggle because the key-value cache (KV cache) memory for each request is huge and grows and shrinks…
Transformers have become central to natural language processing and large language models, but their deployment at scale faces three major challenges. First, the attention mechanism requires massive matrix multiplications and frequent…
Tiny deep learning on microcontroller units (MCUs) is challenging due to the limited memory size. We find that the memory bottleneck is due to the imbalanced memory distribution in convolutional neural network (CNN) designs: the first…
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…
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…
The integration of hardware accelerators has significantly advanced the capabilities of modern recommendation systems, enabling the exploration of complex ranking paradigms previously deemed impractical. However, the GPU-based computational…
Diffusion transformer-based video generation models (DiTs) have recently attracted widespread attention for their excellent generation quality. However, their computational cost remains a major bottleneck-attention alone accounts for over…
Transformers have been successful in many vision tasks, thanks to their capability of capturing long-range dependency. However, their quadratic computational complexity poses a major obstacle for applying them to vision tasks requiring…