Related papers: GQLA: Group-Query Latent Attention for Hardware-Ad…

Reducing the key-value (KV) cache size is a crucial step toward enabling efficient inference in large language models (LLMs), especially under latency and memory constraints. While Multi-Head Attention (MHA) offers strong representational…

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,…

Grouped-Query Attention (GQA) is a widely adopted strategy for reducing the computational cost of attention layers in large language models (LLMs). However, current GQA configurations are often suboptimal because they overlook how context…

Multi-head latent attention (MLA) is designed to optimize KV cache memory through low-rank key-value joint compression. Rather than caching keys and values separately, MLA stores their compressed latent representations, reducing memory…

Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) significantly reduces KVCache memory usage in Large Language Models while introducing substantial computational overhead and intermediate variable expansion. This poses challenges for efficient hardware…

While the Transformer architecture dominates many fields, its quadratic self-attention complexity hinders its use in large-scale applications. Linear attention offers an efficient alternative, but its direct application often degrades…

While FP8 attention has shown substantial promise in innovations like FlashAttention-3, its integration into the decoding phase of the DeepSeek Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) architecture presents notable challenges. These challenges…

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…

Excessive memory requirements of key and value features (KV-cache) present significant challenges in the autoregressive inference of large language models (LLMs), restricting both the speed and length of text generation. Approaches such as…

More and more evidence has shown that strengthening layer interactions can enhance the representation power of a deep neural network, while self-attention excels at learning interdependencies by retrieving query-activated information.…

We investigate a fundamental structural question in Grouped Query Attention (GQA) transformers: do the layers most sensitive to task correctness coincide with the layers where positional encoding adaptation has the greatest leverage? We…

In the field of deep learning, traditional attention mechanisms face significant challenges related to high computational complexity and large memory consumption when processing long sequence data. To address these limitations, we propose…

The reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) can be improved by structurally denoising their weights, yet existing techniques primarily focus on denoising the feed-forward network (FFN) of the transformer block, and can not…

Efficient inference of Multi-Head Latent Attention (MLA) is challenged by deploying the DeepSeek-R1 671B model on a single Multi-GPU server. This paper introduces FlashMLA-ETAP, a novel framework that enhances MLA inference for the…

The pursuit of reducing the memory footprint of the self-attention mechanism in multi-headed self attention (MHA) spawned a rich portfolio of methods, e.g., group-query attention (GQA) and multi-head latent attention (MLA). The methods…

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…

The attention mechanism is an important reason for the success of transformers. It relies on computing pairwise relations between tokens. To reduce the high computational cost of standard quadratic attention, linear attention has been…

Self-attention in Transformers is typically implemented as $\mathrm{softmax}(QK^\top/\sqrt{d})V$, where $Q=XW_Q$, $K=XW_K$, and $V=XW_V$ are learned linear projections of the input $X$. We ask whether these learned projections are…

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…