Speed Always Wins: A Survey on Efficient Architectures for Large Language Models
Reviewed by Pith T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 kernel pith:DW2ADTY3record.jsonopen to challenge →
read the original abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) have delivered impressive results in language understanding, generation, reasoning, and pushes the ability boundary of multimodal models. Transformer models, as the foundation of modern LLMs, offer a strong baseline with excellent scaling properties. However, the traditional transformer architecture requires substantial computations and poses significant obstacles for large-scale training and practical deployment. In this survey, we offer a systematic examination of innovative LLM architectures that address the inherent limitations of transformers and boost the efficiency. Starting from language modeling, this survey covers the background and technical details of linear and sparse sequence modeling methods, efficient full attention variants, sparse mixture-of-experts, hybrid model architectures incorporating the above techniques, and emerging diffusion LLMs. Additionally, we discuss applications of these techniques to other modalities and consider their wider implications for developing scalable, resource-aware foundation models. By grouping recent studies into the above category, this survey presents a blueprint of modern efficient LLM architectures, and we hope this could help motivate future research toward more efficient, versatile AI systems.
This paper has not been read by Pith yet.
Forward citations
Cited by 8 Pith papers
-
On the Reasoning Abilities of Masked Diffusion Language Models
Masked diffusion models are equivalent to polynomially-padded PLTs, solve all CoT-augmented transformer problems, and are more efficient than CoT for regular languages due to parallelism.
-
Morphing into Hybrid Attention Models
FlashMorph formulates hybrid layer selection as budget-constrained optimization, trains per-layer gates on synthetic retrieval data with linearization regularization, then discretizes and distills to produce efficient...
-
PSD: Pushing the Pareto Frontier of Diffusion LLMs via Parallel Speculative Decoding
PSD is a training-free framework that jointly optimizes spatial unmasking and temporal speculative decoding in diffusion LLMs to reach up to 5.5x tokens per forward pass while preserving accuracy comparable to greedy ...
-
Attention Sink in Transformers: A Survey on Utilization, Interpretation, and Mitigation
The first survey on Attention Sink in Transformers structures the literature around fundamental utilization, mechanistic interpretation, and strategic mitigation.
-
LayerBoost: Layer-Aware Attention Reduction for Efficient LLMs
LayerBoost applies layer-specific attention changes guided by sensitivity analysis plus brief distillation to cut LLM inference latency up to 68% while keeping competitive quality.
-
Kimi Linear: An Expressive, Efficient Attention Architecture
Kimi Linear hybridizes linear attention with a new KDA module to beat full attention on tasks while slashing KV cache by 75% and speeding decoding up to 6x.
-
LayerBoost: Layer-Aware Attention Reduction for Efficient LLMs
LayerBoost selectively replaces or removes attention in non-critical transformer layers to cut inference latency up to 68% while recovering quality via brief distillation.
-
Hybrid Architectures for Language Models: Systematic Analysis and Design Insights
This work systematically compares inter-layer and intra-layer hybridization strategies for combining self-attention and Mamba-style state space models, evaluating them on language modeling, downstream tasks, long-cont...
discussion (0)
Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.