Related papers: Latent-Condensed Transformer for Efficient Long Co…

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong multi-modal reasoning capabilities, enabling direct action generation from visual perception and language instructions in an end-to-end manner. However, their substantial…

Long contexts improve capabilities of large language models but pose serious hardware challenges: compute and memory footprints grow linearly with sequence length. Particularly, the decoding phase continuously accesses massive KV cache,…

Large Language Models (LLMs), epitomized by ChatGPT's release in late 2022, have revolutionized various industries with their advanced language comprehension. However, their efficiency is challenged by the Transformer architecture's…

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly boosted long-context processing. However, the increasing key-value (KV) cache size poses critical challenges to memory and execution efficiency. Most KV cache compression…

Inference with Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) on long sequences is both costly and slow due to the quadratic complexity of the self-attention mechanism. We introduce Star Attention, a two-phase block-sparse approximation…

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance across a versatile set of tasks. A key challenge in accelerating VLMs is storing and accessing the large Key-Value (KV) cache that encodes long visual contexts, such as…

The long-context capability of recent large transformer models can be surmised to rely on techniques such as attention/model parallelism, as well as hardware-level optimizations. While these strategies allow input lengths to scale to…

Scaling the effective context length is essential for advancing large language models (LLMs) toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). However, the quadratic increase in computational complexity inherent in traditional attention…

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…

With the rising popularity of Transformer-based large language models (LLMs), reducing their high inference costs has become a significant research focus. One effective approach is to compress the long input contexts. Existing methods…

Attention is the dominant source of latency during long-context LLM inference, an increasingly popular workload with reasoning models and RAG. We propose Kascade, a training-free sparse attention method that leverages known observations…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have ignited an innovative surge of AI applications, marking a new era of exciting possibilities equipped with extended context windows. However, hosting these models is cost-prohibitive mainly due to the…

Efficient long-context inference is critical as large language models (LLMs) adopt context windows of ranging from 128K to 1M tokens. However, the growing key-value (KV) cache and the high computational complexity of attention create…

In this work, we study how multi-head latent attention (MLA), a popular strategy for compressing key/value memory, affects a transformer's internal capacity during pretraining. Using a lightweight suite of Marchenko-Pastur (MP) diagnostics,…

Soft attention is a critical mechanism powering LLMs to locate relevant parts within a given context. However, individual attention weights are determined by the similarity of only a single query and key token vector. This "single token…

Computational workloads composing traditional transformer models are starkly bifurcated. Multi-Head Attention (MHA) and Grouped-Query Attention are memory-bound due to low arithmetic intensity, while FeedForward Networks are compute-bound.…

Slim attention shrinks the context memory size by 2x for transformer models with MHA (multi-head attention), which can speed up inference by up to 2x for large context windows. Slim attention is an exact, mathematically identical…

The rapid expansion of context window sizes in Large Language Models~(LLMs) has enabled them to tackle increasingly complex tasks involving lengthy documents. However, this progress comes at the cost of a substantial increase in memory…

In this study, we introduce adaptive KV cache compression, a plug-and-play method that reduces the memory footprint of generative inference for Large Language Models (LLMs). Different from the conventional KV cache that retains key and…

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…