Related papers: TiledAttention: a CUDA Tile SDPA Kernel for PyTorc…

The transformer's attention mechanism has revolutionized AI and machine learning, with its efficient computation being crucial to its performance. However, calculating attention involves matrix operations interspersed with softmax…

NVIDIA's CUDA Tile (CuTile) introduces a Python-based, tile-centric abstraction for GPU kernel development that aims to simplify programming while retaining Tensor Core and Tensor Memory Accelerator (TMA) efficiency on modern GPUs. We…

Token pruning methods for Vision Transformers (ViTs) promise quadratic reductions in attention FLOPs by dropping uninformative patches. Yet standard variable-length attention APIs -- including FlashAttention-2's varlen and PyTorch's…

Diffusion Transformers, particularly for video generation, achieve remarkable quality but suffer from quadratic attention complexity, leading to prohibitive latency. Existing acceleration methods face a fundamental trade-off: dynamically…

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.…

We provide an optimized implementation of the forward pass of FlashAttention-2, a popular memory-aware scaled dot-product attention algorithm, as a custom fused CUDA kernel targeting NVIDIA Hopper architecture and written using the…

Attention is a fundamental building block of large language models (LLMs), so there have been many efforts to implement it efficiently. For example, FlashAttention leverages tiling and kernel fusion to optimize attention. Recently, a number…

Attention accounts for an increasingly dominant fraction of total computation during inference for mixture-of-experts (MoE) models, making efficient acceleration critical. Emerging domain-specific accelerators for large model inference are…

PagedAttention is a popular approach for dynamic memory allocation in LLM serving systems. It enables on-demand allocation of GPU memory to mitigate KV cache fragmentation -- a phenomenon that crippled the batch size (and consequently…

Leveraging long contexts is crucial for advanced AI systems, but attention computation poses a scalability challenge. While scaled dot-product attention (SDPA) exhibits token sparsity, i.e. only a few pivotal tokens significantly contribute…

Although quantization for linear layers has been widely used, its application to accelerate the attention process remains limited. To further enhance the efficiency of attention computation compared to SageAttention while maintaining…

Attention, as a core layer of the ubiquitous Transformer architecture, is the bottleneck for large language models and long-context applications. While FlashAttention-3 optimized attention for Hopper GPUs through asynchronous execution and…

Current hierarchical attention methods, such as NSA and InfLLMv2, select the top-k relevant key-value (KV) blocks based on coarse attention scores and subsequently apply fine-grained softmax attention on the selected tokens. However, the…

Transformer models rely heavily on the scaled dot-product attention (SDPA) operation, typically implemented as FlashAttention. Characterized by its frequent interleaving of matrix multiplications and softmax operations, FlashAttention fails…

Transformer-based models have emerged as a leading architecture for natural language processing, natural language generation, and image generation tasks. A fundamental element of the transformer architecture is self-attention, which allows…

Over the past 7 years, attention has become one of the most important primitives in deep learning. The primary approach to optimize attention is FlashAttention, which fuses the operation together, drastically improving both the runtime and…

Efficient attention algorithms are critical to mitigate the quadratic cost of attention in long-context workloads. Prior work utilises block-scaled quantisation techniques on Blackwell GPUs to move attention computation to 4-bit precision…

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…

FlashAttention series has been widely applied in the inference of large language models (LLMs). However, FlashAttention series only supports the high-level GPU architectures, e.g., Ampere and Hopper. At present, FlashAttention series is not…

Attention mechanisms, particularly softmax attention, have been instrumental in the success of transformer-based models such as GPT. However, the quadratic memory complexity of softmax attention with respect to sequence length poses…