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The recent hardware-accelerated microscaling 4-bit floating-point formats such as MXFP4 and NVFP4, supported on NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, promise to revolutionize large language model (LLM) inference. Yet, their practical benefits remain…

Despite significant work on low-bit quantization-aware training (QAT), there is still an accuracy gap between such techniques and native training. To address this, we introduce CAGE (Curvature-Aware Gradient Estimation), a new QAT method…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Soroush Tabesh , Mher Safaryan , Andrei Panferov , Alexandra Volkova , Dan Alistarh

Deploying Transformer models on edge devices is limited by latency and energy budgets. While INT8 quantization effectively accelerates the primary matrix multiplications, it exposes the softmax as the dominant bottleneck. This stage incurs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Wanli Zhong , Haibo Feng , Zirui Zhou , Hanyang Peng , Shiqi Yu

A long-standing goal in both industry and academia is to develop an LLM inference platform that is portable across hardware architectures, eliminates the need for low-level hand-tuning, and still delivers best-in-class efficiency. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Burkhard Ringlein , Jan van Lunteren , Radu Stoica , Thomas Parnell

Training large language models using 4-bit arithmetic enhances throughput and memory efficiency. Yet, the limited dynamic range of FP4 increases sensitivity to outliers. While NVFP4 mitigates quantization error via hierarchical…

With the rise of Transformer models in NLP and CV domain, Multi-Head Attention has been proven to be a game-changer. However, its expensive computation poses challenges to the model throughput and efficiency, especially for the long…

Image and Video Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-04-12 Jiing-Ping Wang , Ming-Guang Lin , An-Yeu , Wu

Integer AI inference significantly reduces computational complexity in embedded systems. Quantization-aware training (QAT) helps mitigate accuracy degradation associated with post-training quantization but still overlooks the impact of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Lion Mueller , Alberto Garcia-Ortiz , Ardalan Najafi , Adam Fuks , Lennart Bamberg

Softmax Attention has a quadratic time complexity in sequence length, which becomes prohibitive to run at long contexts, even with highly optimized GPU kernels. For example, FlashAttention-2/3 (exact, GPU-optimized implementations of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Sahil Joshi , Agniva Chowdhury , Amar Kanakamedala , Ekam Singh , Evan Tu , Anshumali Shrivastava

The advent of foundation models have revolutionized various fields, enabling unprecedented task accuracy and flexibility in computational linguistics, computer vision and other domains. Attention mechanism has become an essential component…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-05-19 Mohammadali Shakerdargah , Shan Lu , Chao Gao , Di Niu

Text-to-image generation models, especially Multimodal Diffusion Transformers (MMDiT), have shown remarkable progress in generating high-quality images. However, these models often face significant computational bottlenecks, particularly in…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-04-01 Hanling Zhang , Rundong Su , Zhihang Yuan , Pengtao Chen , Mingzhu Shen Yibo Fan , Shengen Yan , Guohao Dai , Yu Wang

Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide range of real-world tasks, but their inference cost remains prohibitively high due to the quadratic complexity of attention and the memory…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Yifu Ding , Xinhao Zhang , Jinyang Guo

Sparse-Linear Attention (SLA) combines sparse and linear attention to accelerate diffusion models and has shown strong performance in video generation. However, (i) SLA relies on a heuristic split that assigns computations to the sparse or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Jintao Zhang , Haoxu Wang , Kai Jiang , Kaiwen Zheng , Youhe Jiang , Ion Stoica , Jianfei Chen , Jun Zhu , Joseph E. Gonzalez

Post-training quantization (PTQ) for vision transformers (ViTs) has garnered significant attention due to its efficiency in compressing models. However, existing methods typically overlook the relationship between a well-trained NN and the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Peng Xia , Junbiao Pang , Tianyang Cai

Data-free quantization aims to achieve model quantization without accessing any authentic sample. It is significant in an application-oriented context involving data privacy. Converting noise vectors into synthetic samples through a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-08-01 Jixing Li , Xiaozhou Guo , Benzhe Dai , Guoliang Gong , Min Jin , Gang Chen , Wenyu Mao , Huaxiang Lu

Autoregressive Transformers are strong language models but incur O(T) complexity during per-token generation due to the self-attention mechanism. Recent work proposes kernel-based methods to approximate causal self-attention by replacing it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-11 Huanru Henry Mao

Quantization is a key method for reducing the GPU memory requirement of training large language models (LLMs). Yet, current approaches are ineffective for 4-bit activations and 8-bit gradients, which would easily cause slow convergence or…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Wenxiang Lin , Juntao Huang , Luhan Zhang , Laili Li , Xiang Bao , Mengyang Zhang , Bing Wang , Shaohuai Shi

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…

While linear-complexity attention mechanisms offer a promising alternative to Softmax attention for overcoming the quadratic bottleneck, training such models from scratch remains prohibitively expensive. Inheriting weights from pretrained…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Yining Li , Dongchen Han , Zeyu Liu , Hanyi Wang , Yulin Wang , Gao Huang

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Sakshi Choudhary , Aditya Chattopadhyay , Luca Zancato , Elvis Nunez , Matthew Trager , Wei Xia , Stefano Soatto

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-11 Zhengyu Tian , Anantha Padmanaban Krishna Kumar , Hemant Krishnakumar , Reza Rawassizadeh