ε-coresets for attention exist of size O(√d e^{ρ+o(ρ)}/ε) for unit-norm keys/values and queries of norm ≤ρ, nearly matching the Ω(√d e^ρ/ε) lower bound.
hub Mixed citations
Fast Transformer Decoding: One Write-Head is All You Need
Mixed citation behavior. Most common role is background (67%).
abstract
Multi-head attention layers, as used in the Transformer neural sequence model, are a powerful alternative to RNNs for moving information across and between sequences. While training these layers is generally fast and simple, due to parallelizability across the length of the sequence, incremental inference (where such paralleization is impossible) is often slow, due to the memory-bandwidth cost of repeatedly loading the large "keys" and "values" tensors. We propose a variant called multi-query attention, where the keys and values are shared across all of the different attention "heads", greatly reducing the size of these tensors and hence the memory bandwidth requirements of incremental decoding. We verify experimentally that the resulting models can indeed be much faster to decode, and incur only minor quality degradation from the baseline.
hub tools
citation-role summary
citation-polarity summary
claims ledger
- abstract Multi-head attention layers, as used in the Transformer neural sequence model, are a powerful alternative to RNNs for moving information across and between sequences. While training these layers is generally fast and simple, due to parallelizability across the length of the sequence, incremental inference (where such paralleization is impossible) is often slow, due to the memory-bandwidth cost of repeatedly loading the large "keys" and "values" tensors. We propose a variant called multi-query attention, where the keys and values are shared across all of the different attention "heads", greatly
co-cited works
representative citing papers
Tensor Cache augments sliding-window attention with an eviction-fed outer-product associative memory and a training correction to improve long-context performance under bounded memory.
LLMForge is a NAS framework with Infinite-Head Attention, a Forge-Former surrogate, and Forge-DSE engine that discovers hardware-specific architectures for edge language models, yielding variants with improved accuracy, energy, or latency on different substrates.
RPA kernel for TPUs achieves 86% MBU in decode and 73% MFU in prefill on Llama 3 8B via tiling for ragged memory, fused pipelines, and specialized compilation for prefill/decode workloads.
HormoneT5 augments T5 with a hormone-inspired block that predicts six continuous emotion values and uses them to modulate responses, reporting over 85% per-hormone accuracy and human preference for emotional quality.
MMEE encodes dataflow decisions in matrix form for fast exhaustive search, delivering 40-69% lower latency and energy use than prior methods while running 64-343x faster.
SCOPE accelerates autoregressive video diffusion up to 4.73x by using a tri-modal cache-predict-recompute scheduler with Taylor extrapolation and selective active-frame computation while preserving output quality.
One of the Q, K or V weights in transformer self-attention is redundant and replaceable by the identity matrix under mild assumptions, reducing parameters by 25 percent with no loss in small-model performance.
DELTA partitions layers into full, delta, and sparse groups to select salient tokens via aggregated attention scores, matching full-attention accuracy on AIME and GPQA while cutting attended tokens up to 4.25x and achieving 1.54x speedup.
FlashAttention-3 achieves 1.5-2x speedup on H100 GPUs for attention, reaching 740 TFLOPs/s (75% utilization) in FP16 and near 1.2 PFLOPs/s in FP8 while cutting numerical error by 2.6x versus baseline FP8 attention.
Transformers and SSMs are unified through structured state space duality, producing a 2-8X faster Mamba-2 model that remains competitive with Transformers.
DeepSeek-V2 delivers top-tier open-source LLM performance using only 21B active parameters by compressing the KV cache 93.3% and cutting training costs 42.5% via MLA and DeepSeekMoE.
Griffin hybrid model matches Llama-2 performance while trained on over 6 times fewer tokens and offers lower inference latency with higher throughput.
Medusa augments LLMs with multiple decoding heads and tree-based attention to predict and verify several tokens in parallel, yielding 2.2-3.6x inference speedup via two fine-tuning regimes.
A new shared video-image tokenizer enables large language models to surpass diffusion models on standard visual generation benchmarks.
Speculative sampling accelerates LLM decoding 2-2.5x by letting a draft model propose short sequences that the target model scores in parallel, then applies modified rejection sampling to keep the exact target distribution.
Speculative decoding accelerates exact sampling from large autoregressive models by 2-3x on T5-XXL by running smaller approximation models in parallel to propose token sequences that the large model then verifies in batches while preserving the original output distribution.
DREAM-S combines neural architecture search, target-aware supernet training, and attention-entropy-guided distillation to accelerate speculative decoding in VLMs, reporting up to 3.85x speedup over standard methods.
BlockBatch is a training-free framework that coordinates multiple block-size branches via token merging and synchronization to reduce denoising NFEs by 26.6% and achieve 1.33x speedup in dLLM inference.
ArborKV uses search-structure awareness to evict low-reuse KV states in Tree-of-Thoughts inference, delivering up to 4x memory savings with near-full accuracy retention.
ObjectCache enables KV cache storage in object storage via layerwise retrieval and custom scheduling, adding 5.6% latency for 64K contexts over local DRAM on a 100 Gbps RoCE cluster.
LRCP prunes visual tokens in LVLMs by scoring projection residuals onto a PCA-estimated low-rank subspace, achieving 88.9% image token reduction with 94.7% performance retention and 87.5% video reduction with 97.8% accuracy retention.
Attention to goal tokens declines in multi-turn LLM interactions while residual representations often retain decodable goal information, and the gap between these predicts whether goal-conditioned behavior survives.
ScaleSearch optimizes block floating point scales via fine-grained search to cut quantization error by 27% for NVFP4, improving PTQ by up to 15 points on MATH500 for Qwen3-8B and attention PPL by 0.77 on Llama 3.1 70B.
citing papers explorer
-
Nearly Optimal Attention Coresets
ε-coresets for attention exist of size O(√d e^{ρ+o(ρ)}/ε) for unit-norm keys/values and queries of norm ≤ρ, nearly matching the Ω(√d e^ρ/ε) lower bound.
-
Tensor Cache: Eviction-conditioned Associative Memory for Transformers
Tensor Cache augments sliding-window attention with an eviction-fed outer-product associative memory and a training correction to improve long-context performance under bounded memory.
-
LLMForge: Multi-Backend Hardware-Aware Neural Architecture Search with Infinite-Head Attention for Edge Language Models
LLMForge is a NAS framework with Infinite-Head Attention, a Forge-Former surrogate, and Forge-DSE engine that discovers hardware-specific architectures for edge language models, yielding variants with improved accuracy, energy, or latency on different substrates.
-
Ragged Paged Attention: A High-Performance and Flexible LLM Inference Kernel for TPU
RPA kernel for TPUs achieves 86% MBU in decode and 73% MFU in prefill on Llama 3 8B via tiling for ragged memory, fused pipelines, and specialized compilation for prefill/decode workloads.
-
A Hormone-inspired Emotion Layer for Transformer language models (HELT)
HormoneT5 augments T5 with a hormone-inspired block that predicts six continuous emotion values and uses them to modulate responses, reporting over 85% per-hormone accuracy and human preference for emotional quality.
-
Fast Cross-Operator Optimization of Attention Dataflow
MMEE encodes dataflow decisions in matrix form for fast exhaustive search, delivering 40-69% lower latency and energy use than prior methods while running 64-343x faster.
-
Not All Frames Deserve Full Computation: Accelerating Autoregressive Video Generation via Selective Computation and Predictive Extrapolation
SCOPE accelerates autoregressive video diffusion up to 4.73x by using a tri-modal cache-predict-recompute scheduler with Taylor extrapolation and selective active-frame computation while preserving output quality.
-
Key and Value Weights Are Probably All You Need: On the Necessity of the Query, Key, Value weight Triplet in Self-Attention Transformers
One of the Q, K or V weights in transformer self-attention is redundant and replaceable by the identity matrix under mild assumptions, reducing parameters by 25 percent with no loss in small-model performance.
-
DELTA: Dynamic Layer-Aware Token Attention for Efficient Long-Context Reasoning
DELTA partitions layers into full, delta, and sparse groups to select salient tokens via aggregated attention scores, matching full-attention accuracy on AIME and GPQA while cutting attended tokens up to 4.25x and achieving 1.54x speedup.
-
FlashAttention-3: Fast and Accurate Attention with Asynchrony and Low-precision
FlashAttention-3 achieves 1.5-2x speedup on H100 GPUs for attention, reaching 740 TFLOPs/s (75% utilization) in FP16 and near 1.2 PFLOPs/s in FP8 while cutting numerical error by 2.6x versus baseline FP8 attention.
-
Transformers are SSMs: Generalized Models and Efficient Algorithms Through Structured State Space Duality
Transformers and SSMs are unified through structured state space duality, producing a 2-8X faster Mamba-2 model that remains competitive with Transformers.
-
DeepSeek-V2: A Strong, Economical, and Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Language Model
DeepSeek-V2 delivers top-tier open-source LLM performance using only 21B active parameters by compressing the KV cache 93.3% and cutting training costs 42.5% via MLA and DeepSeekMoE.
-
Griffin: Mixing Gated Linear Recurrences with Local Attention for Efficient Language Models
Griffin hybrid model matches Llama-2 performance while trained on over 6 times fewer tokens and offers lower inference latency with higher throughput.
-
Medusa: Simple LLM Inference Acceleration Framework with Multiple Decoding Heads
Medusa augments LLMs with multiple decoding heads and tree-based attention to predict and verify several tokens in parallel, yielding 2.2-3.6x inference speedup via two fine-tuning regimes.
-
Language Model Beats Diffusion -- Tokenizer is Key to Visual Generation
A new shared video-image tokenizer enables large language models to surpass diffusion models on standard visual generation benchmarks.
-
Accelerating Large Language Model Decoding with Speculative Sampling
Speculative sampling accelerates LLM decoding 2-2.5x by letting a draft model propose short sequences that the target model scores in parallel, then applies modified rejection sampling to keep the exact target distribution.
-
Fast Inference from Transformers via Speculative Decoding
Speculative decoding accelerates exact sampling from large autoregressive models by 2-3x on T5-XXL by running smaller approximation models in parallel to propose token sequences that the large model then verifies in batches while preserving the original output distribution.
-
DREAM-S: Speculative Decoding with Searchable Drafting and Target-Aware Refinement for Multimodal Generation
DREAM-S combines neural architecture search, target-aware supernet training, and attention-entropy-guided distillation to accelerate speculative decoding in VLMs, reporting up to 3.85x speedup over standard methods.
-
BlockBatch: Multi-Scale Consensus Decoding for Efficient Diffusion Language Model Inference
BlockBatch is a training-free framework that coordinates multiple block-size branches via token merging and synchronization to reduce denoising NFEs by 26.6% and achieve 1.33x speedup in dLLM inference.
-
ArborKV: Structure-Aware KV Cache Management for Scaling Tree-based LLM Reasoning
ArborKV uses search-structure awareness to evict low-reuse KV states in Tree-of-Thoughts inference, delivering up to 4x memory savings with near-full accuracy retention.
-
ObjectCache: Layerwise Object-Storage Retrieval for KV Cache Reuse
ObjectCache enables KV cache storage in object storage via layerwise retrieval and custom scheduling, adding 5.6% latency for 64K contexts over local DRAM on a 100 Gbps RoCE cluster.
-
LRCP: Low-Rank Compressibility Guided Visual Token Pruning for Efficient LVLMs
LRCP prunes visual tokens in LVLMs by scoring projection residuals onto a PCA-estimated low-rank subspace, achieving 88.9% image token reduction with 94.7% performance retention and 87.5% video reduction with 97.8% accuracy retention.
-
When Attention Closes: How LLMs Lose the Thread in Multi-Turn Interaction
Attention to goal tokens declines in multi-turn LLM interactions while residual representations often retain decodable goal information, and the gap between these predicts whether goal-conditioned behavior survives.
-
Search Your Block Floating Point Scales!
ScaleSearch optimizes block floating point scales via fine-grained search to cut quantization error by 27% for NVFP4, improving PTQ by up to 15 points on MATH500 for Qwen3-8B and attention PPL by 0.77 on Llama 3.1 70B.
-
Nectar: Neural Estimation of Cached-Token Attention via Regression
Nectar fits small per-layer per-head neural networks via regression to predict attention outputs and normalizers, enabling constant-time inference independent of context length while preserving semantic generation quality.
-
Memory-Efficient Looped Transformer: Decoupling Compute from Memory in Looped Language Models
MELT decouples reasoning depth from memory in looped language models by sharing a single gated KV cache per layer and training it via chunk-wise distillation from Ouro starting models.
-
Revisiting Transformer Layer Parameterization Through Causal Energy Minimization
CEM recasts Transformer layers as energy minimization steps, enabling constrained parameterizations like weight sharing and low-rank interactions that match standard baselines in 100M-scale language modeling.
-
ZAYA1-8B Technical Report
ZAYA1-8B is a reasoning MoE model with 700M active parameters that matches larger models on math and coding benchmarks and reaches 91.9% on AIME'25 via Markovian RSA test-time compute.
-
The Impossibility Triangle of Long-Context Modeling
No model can achieve efficiency, compactness, and recall capacity scaling with sequence length at once, as any two imply a strict bound of O(poly(d)/log V) on recallable facts.
-
WindowQuant: Mixed-Precision KV Cache Quantization based on Window-Level Similarity for VLMs Inference Optimization
WindowQuant performs window-adaptive mixed-precision KV cache quantization guided by similarity to the text prompt, with reordering to enable efficient inference in VLMs.
-
Sub-Token Routing in LoRA for Adaptation and Query-Aware KV Compression
Sub-token routing in LoRA-adapted transformers adds a finer compression axis for KV caches, with query-independent and query-aware designs that improve efficiency under reduced budgets when combined with token-level selection.
-
Graph-Guided Adaptive Channel Elimination for KV Cache Compression
GRACE reframes KV cache channel pruning as graph optimization to find a near-optimal subset, achieving 60% compression with negligible degradation and outperforming prior methods.
-
Open-TQ-Metal: Fused Compressed-Domain Attention for Long-Context LLM Inference on Apple Silicon
Fused compressed-domain int4 attention on Apple Silicon delivers 48x speedup and 3.2x KV cache compression for 128K-context 70B models while matching FP16 token predictions.
-
The Illusion of Equivalence: Systematic FP16 Divergence in KV-Cached Autoregressive Inference
FP16 KV caching in transformers causes deterministic token divergence versus cache-free inference due to non-associative floating-point accumulation orderings.
-
Blink: CPU-Free LLM Inference by Delegating the Serving Stack to GPU and SmartNIC
Blink enables CPU-free LLM inference via SmartNIC offload and persistent GPU kernel, delivering up to 8.47x lower P99 TTFT, 3.4x lower P99 TPOT, 2.1x higher decode throughput, and 48.6% lower energy per token while remaining stable under CPU interference.
-
TRAPTI: Time-Resolved Analysis for SRAM Banking and Power Gating Optimization in Embedded Transformer Inference
TRAPTI delivers cycle-accurate memory occupancy traces to guide SRAM banking and power-gating choices, showing a 2.72x lower peak memory footprint for a GQA model versus MHA under identical accelerator settings.
-
ForkKV: Scaling Multi-LoRA Agent Serving via Copy-on-Write Disaggregated KV Cache
ForkKV uses copy-on-write disaggregated KV cache with DualRadixTree and ResidualAttention kernels to deliver up to 3x throughput over prior multi-LoRA serving systems with negligible quality loss.
-
Attention Editing: A Versatile Framework for Cross-Architecture Attention Conversion
Attention Editing converts pre-trained LLMs to new attention architectures through layer-wise teacher-forced optimization and model-level distillation, preserving performance with efficiency gains.
-
CSAttention: Centroid-Scoring Attention for Accelerating LLM Inference
CSAttention precomputes fixed-size query-centric lookup tables in offline prefill to enable fast table-lookup decoding, delivering near-identical accuracy to full attention and up to 4.6x speedup at 95% sparsity for 32K-128K contexts.
-
EchoKV: Efficient KV Cache Compression via Similarity-Based Reconstruction
EchoKV compresses LLM KV caches by reconstructing missing components from partial data via inter- and intra-layer attention similarities, outperforming prior methods on LongBench and RULER while supporting on-demand full-cache inference.
-
Structural Sensitivity in Compressed Transformers: Relative Error Propagation and Layer Removal
Per-layer error amplification factor rho predicts representation drift in compressed transformers and guides superior pruning and layer-removal decisions compared to prior heuristics.
-
SweetSpot: An Analytical Model for Predicting Energy Efficiency of LLM Inference
SweetSpot is an analytical model from Transformer computational and memory complexity that identifies energy minima at short-to-moderate inputs and medium outputs, achieving 1.79% MAPE on H100 GPU measurements across multiple LLMs.
-
mHC: Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections
mHC projects hyper-connection residual spaces onto a manifold to restore identity mapping, enabling stable large-scale training with performance gains over standard HC.
-
BOOST: BOttleneck-Optimized Scalable Training Framework for Low-Rank Large Language Models
BOOST delivers 1.46-2.27x end-to-end speedups for low-rank bottleneck LLMs by redesigning tensor parallelism around the bottleneck structure plus supporting optimizations.
-
A3 : an Analytical Low-Rank Approximation Framework for Attention
A3 splits Transformer layers into QK, OV, and MLP components and derives analytical low-rank approximations that reduce hidden dimensions while minimizing each component's functional loss, yielding better perplexity than prior low-rank methods on LLaMA models.
-
TurboQuant: Online Vector Quantization with Near-optimal Distortion Rate
TurboQuant achieves near-optimal vector quantization distortion for both MSE and inner products via random rotation and per-coordinate scalar quantization, with a formal proof that it matches lower bounds within a factor of approximately 2.7.
-
LogQuant: Log-Distributed 2-Bit Quantization of KV Cache with Superior Accuracy Preservation
LogQuant applies log-based filtering for 2-bit KV cache quantization in LLMs, claiming 25% higher throughput, 60% larger batches, and 40-200% accuracy gains on math/code tasks versus existing compression approaches.
-
Native Sparse Attention: Hardware-Aligned and Natively Trainable Sparse Attention
NSA is a hardware-aligned sparse attention mechanism that enables end-to-end trainable long-context modeling by combining coarse token compression with fine-grained selection.
-
$\pi_0$: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Control
π₀ is a vision-language-action flow model trained on diverse multi-platform robot data that supports zero-shot task performance, language instruction following, and efficient fine-tuning for dexterous tasks.
-
LightTransfer: Your Long-Context LLM is Secretly a Hybrid Model with Effortless Adaptation
LightTransfer identifies lazy layers in LLMs like LLaMA and replaces their attention with streaming attention to form hybrid models, delivering up to 2.17x throughput with under 1.5% drop on LongBench and strong results on reasoning benchmarks.