Related papers: Interleaved Head Attention

Large Language Models (LLMs) with hundreds of billions of parameters have transformed the field of machine learning. However, serving these models at inference time is both compute and memory intensive, where a single request can require…

Multi-Head Latent Attention (MLA), introduced in DeepSeek-V2, improves the efficiency of large language models by projecting query, key, and value tensors into a compact latent space. This architectural change reduces the KV-cache size and…

Answering multi-hop reasoning questions requires retrieving and synthesizing information from diverse sources. Language models (LMs) struggle to perform such reasoning consistently. We propose an approach to pinpoint and rectify multi-hop…

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…

The advent of pre-trained large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized various natural language processing tasks. These models predominantly employ an auto-regressive decoding mechanism that utilizes Key-Value (KV) caches to eliminate…

The Transformer architecture, underpinned by the Multi-Head Attention (MHA) mechanism, has become the de facto standard for state-of-the-art models in artificial intelligence. However, the quadratic computational complexity of MHA with…

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…

Recent studies have revealed some issues of Multi-Head Attention (MHA), e.g., redundancy and over-parameterization. Specifically, the heads of MHA were originally designed to attend to information from different representation subspaces,…

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…

Two principles: the complementary principle and the consensus principle are widely acknowledged in the literature of multi-view learning. However, the current design of multi-head self-attention, an instance of multi-view learning,…

Long-context inference in Large Language Models (LLMs) is bottlenecked by the quadratic computation complexity of attention and the substantial memory footprint of Key-Value (KV) caches. While existing sparse attention mechanisms attempt to…

As vision-language models (VLMs) tackle increasingly complex and multimodal tasks, the rapid growth of Key-Value (KV) cache imposes significant memory and computational bottlenecks during inference. While Multi-Head Latent Attention (MLA)…

Attention mechanisms underpin modern deep learning, while the quadratic time and space complexity limit scalability for long sequences. To address this, Quantum Annealing Multi-Head Attention (QAMA) is proposed, a novel drop-in operator…

To enhance the efficiency of the attention mechanism within large language models (LLMs), previous works primarily compress the KV cache or group attention heads, while largely overlooking redundancy between layers. Our comprehensive…

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…

We present the first comprehensive study of latent multi-head attention (MLA) for small language models, revealing interesting efficiency-quality trade-offs. Training 30M-parameter GPT models on 100,000 synthetic stories, we benchmark three…

The transformer has revolutionized modern AI across language, vision, and beyond. It consists of $L$ layers, each running $H$ attention heads in parallel and feeding the combined output to the subsequent layer. In attention, the input…

In this work, we upgrade the multi-head attention mechanism, the core of the Transformer model, to improve efficiency while maintaining or surpassing the previous accuracy level. We show that multi-head attention can be expressed in the…

Long-term memory is a cornerstone of human intelligence. Enabling AI to process lifetime-scale information remains a long-standing pursuit in the field. Due to the constraints of full-attention architectures, the effective context length of…

Multi-head attentive neural architectures have achieved state-of-the-art results on a variety of natural language processing tasks. Evidence has shown that they are overparameterized; attention heads can be pruned without significant…