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Transformer-based models have emerged as one of the most widely used architectures for natural language processing, natural language generation, and image generation. The size of the state-of-the-art models has increased steadily reaching…

Neural network quantization is frequently used to optimize model size, latency and power consumption for on-device deployment of neural networks. In many cases, a target bit-width is set for an entire network, meaning every layer get…

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…

Efficient inference is critical for deploying deep learning models on edge AI devices. Low-bit quantization (e.g., 3- and 4-bit) with fixed-point arithmetic improves efficiency, while low-power memory technologies like analog nonvolatile…

Attention--or attribution--maps methods are methods designed to highlight regions of the model's input that were discriminative for its predictions. However, different attention maps methods can highlight different regions of the input,…

Beam training and prediction in millimeter-wave communications are highly challenging due to fast time-varying channels and sensitivity to blockages and mobility. In this context, infrastructure-mounted cameras can capture rich…

We introduce a simple post-training method that makes transformer attention sparse without sacrificing performance. Applying a flexible sparsity regularisation under a constrained-loss objective, we show on models up to 7B parameters that…

Transformer architecture has been very successful long runner in the field of Deep Learning (DL) and Large Language Models (LLM) because of its powerful attention-based learning and parallel-natured architecture. As the models grow gigantic…

Long-sequence processing is a critical capability for modern large language models. However, the self-attention mechanism in the standard Transformer architecture faces severe computational and memory bottlenecks when processing long…

Recently introduced language model prompting methods can achieve high accuracy in zero- and few-shot settings while requiring few to no learned task-specific parameters. Nevertheless, these methods still often trail behind full model…

This work presents the first finite-time analysis for the last-iterate convergence of average-reward $Q$-learning with an asynchronous implementation. A key feature of the algorithm we study is the use of adaptive stepsizes, which serve as…

Efficient inference is critical for long-context language models, where attention computation and KV-cache access dominate the cost. Recent work RAT+, introduces a recurrence-augmented attention backbone that enables flexible dilated…

Self-attention has greatly contributed to the success of the widely used Transformer architecture by enabling learning from data with long-range dependencies. In an effort to improve performance, a gated attention model that leverages a…

Continual learning is a desirable feature in many modern machine learning applications, which allows in-field adaptation and updating, ranging from accommodating distribution shift, to fine-tuning, and to learning new tasks. For…

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…

Quantization-aware training (QAT) starts with a pre-trained full-precision model and performs quantization during retraining. However, existing QAT works require supervision from the labels and they suffer from accuracy loss due to reduced…

Pre-trained Transformer models such as BERT have shown great success in a wide range of applications, but at the cost of substantial increases in model complexity. Quantization-aware training (QAT) is a promising method to lower the…

With the rapid increase in the size of neural networks, model compression has become an important area of research. Quantization is an effective technique at decreasing the model size, memory access, and compute load of large models.…

We train, for the first time, large language models using FP8 precision on datasets up to 2 trillion tokens -- a 20-fold increase over previous limits. Through these extended training runs, we uncover critical instabilities in FP8 training…

Transformers' quadratic complexity with respect to the input sequence length has motivated a body of work on efficient sparse approximations to softmax. An alternative path, used by entmax transformers, consists of having built-in exact…