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Inference on large language models (LLMs) can be expensive in terms of the compute and memory costs involved, especially when long sequence lengths are used. In particular, the self-attention mechanism used in LLM inference contributes…
Converting pretrained attention modules such as grouped-query attention (GQA) into multi-head latent attention (MLA) can improve expressivity without increasing KV-cache cost, making it attractive for efficient inference. However, many…
Processing long contexts has become a critical capability for modern large language models (LLMs). However, serving long-context LLMs comes with significant inference costs due to the high memory overhead of the key-value (KV) cache.…
Many advanced Large Language Model (LLM) applications require long-context processing, but the self-attention module becomes a bottleneck during the prefilling stage of inference due to its quadratic time complexity with respect to sequence…
The Multi-Head Attention mechanism is central to LLM operation, and multiple works target its compute and memory efficiency during training. While most works focus on approximating the scaled dot product, the memory consumption of the…
The quadratic complexity of attention mechanisms poses a critical bottleneck for large language models processing long contexts. While dynamic sparse attention methods offer input-adaptive efficiency, they face fundamental trade-offs:…
We propose novel attention architectures, Multi-matrix Factorization Attention (MFA) and MFA-Key-Reuse (MFA-KR). Existing variants for standard Multi-Head Attention (MHA), including SOTA methods like MLA, fail to maintain as strong…
Sparse attention improves LLM inference efficiency by selecting a subset of key-value entries, but at the cost of potential accuracy degradation. In particular, omitting critical KV entries can induce substantial errors in model outputs.…
Scaling large language models to long contexts is challenging due to the quadratic computational cost of full attention. Mitigation approaches include KV-cache selection or compression techniques. We instead provide an effective and…
Large Language Models struggle with memory demands from the growing Key-Value (KV) cache as context lengths increase. Existing compression methods homogenize head dimensions or rely on attention-guided token pruning, often sacrificing…
Key-value (KV) caching plays an essential role in accelerating decoding for transformer-based autoregressive large language models (LLMs). However, the amount of memory required to store the KV cache can become prohibitive at long sequence…
KV caching significantly improves the efficiency of Large Language Model (LLM) inference by storing attention states from previously processed tokens, enabling faster generation of subsequent tokens. However, as sequence length increases,…
Effective attention modules have played a crucial role in the success of Transformer-based large language models (LLMs), but the quadratic time and memory complexities of these attention modules also pose a challenge when processing long…
KV cache pruning has emerged as a promising technique for reducing memory and computation costs in long-context auto-regressive generation. Existing methods for vision-language models (VLMs) typically rely on self-attention scores from…
Video Large Language Models (VLLMs) incur substantial prefilling cost due to the large number of visual tokens. While attention-based token pruning offers a promising acceleration strategy, applying it at shallow decoder layers often causes…
Linear attention offers a computationally efficient yet expressive alternative to softmax attention. However, recent empirical results indicate that the hidden state of trained linear attention models often exhibits a low-rank structure,…
Key-value (KV) cache compression has emerged as a critical technique for reducing the memory and latency overhead of autoregressive language models during inference. Prior approaches predominantly rely on query-key attention scores to rank…
Attention mechanisms have significantly advanced visual models by capturing global context effectively. However, their reliance on large-scale datasets and substantial computational resources poses challenges in data-scarce and…
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…
LLM decoding is bottlenecked for large batches and long contexts by loading the key-value (KV) cache from high-bandwidth memory, which inflates per-token latency, while the sequential nature of decoding limits parallelism. We analyze the…