Pith. sign in

REVIEW 33 cited by

Efficiently Scaling Transformer Inference

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2211.05102 v1 pith:2DZYQWNB submitted 2022-11-09 cs.LG cs.CL

Efficiently Scaling Transformer Inference

classification cs.LG cs.CL
keywords modelsinferencelatencymodelachieveapplicationcontextduring
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
0 comments
read the original abstract

We study the problem of efficient generative inference for Transformer models, in one of its most challenging settings: large deep models, with tight latency targets and long sequence lengths. Better understanding of the engineering tradeoffs for inference for large Transformer-based models is important as use cases of these models are growing rapidly throughout application areas. We develop a simple analytical model for inference efficiency to select the best multi-dimensional partitioning techniques optimized for TPU v4 slices based on the application requirements. We combine these with a suite of low-level optimizations to achieve a new Pareto frontier on the latency and model FLOPS utilization (MFU) tradeoffs on 500B+ parameter models that outperforms the FasterTransformer suite of benchmarks. We further show that with appropriate partitioning, the lower memory requirements of multiquery attention (i.e. multiple query heads share single key/value head) enables scaling up to 32x larger context lengths. Finally, we achieve a low-batch-size latency of 29ms per token during generation (using int8 weight quantization) and a 76% MFU during large-batch-size processing of input tokens, while supporting a long 2048-token context length on the PaLM 540B parameter model.

discussion (0)

Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.

Forward citations

Cited by 33 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. RoPE-Aware Bit Allocation for KV-Cache Quantization

    cs.LG 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Block-GTQ performs RoPE-aware greedy bit allocation on KV caches using per-block energy scores, cutting logit MAE 32-80% versus uniform TQ-MSE and lifting long-context task scores substantially at 2-3 bits per dimension.

  2. Rethinking KV Cache Eviction via a Unified Information-Theoretic Objective

    cs.LG 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    KV cache eviction is unified under an information capacity maximization principle derived from a linear-Gaussian attention surrogate, with CapKV proposed as a leverage-score based implementation that outperforms prior...

  3. Continuous Semantic Caching for Low-Cost LLM Serving

    cs.LG 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Establishes the first rigorous framework for continuous semantic caching of LLM responses using ε-net discretization and kernel ridge regression, with sublinear regret bounds.

  4. Medusa: Simple LLM Inference Acceleration Framework with Multiple Decoding Heads

    cs.LG 2024-01 conditional novelty 7.0

    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.

  5. Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention

    cs.LG 2023-09 conditional novelty 7.0

    PagedAttention achieves near-zero waste in LLM key-value cache memory and enables 2-4x higher serving throughput than prior systems.

  6. QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs

    cs.LG 2023-05 conditional novelty 7.0

    QLoRA finetunes 4-bit quantized LLMs via LoRA adapters to match full-precision performance while using far less memory, enabling 65B-scale training on single GPUs and producing Guanaco models near ChatGPT level.

  7. Don't Mix Rewards, Mix Policies: Policy Decomposition and Optimization for Multi-Reward RL

    cs.AI 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    PRISM trains one positive policy per reward plus one global negative policy and merges their token logits, improving multi-reward RL for LLMs with inference-time controllability.

  8. StrataCL: Fabric-Native Communication Library for Production Supernodes

    cs.DC 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    On Huawei CloudMatrix384, StrataCL's registration-on-allocation and fabric-native operators raise collective bus bandwidth up to 1.6x and LLM inference throughput by 1.9x versus HCCL baselines.

  9. The Cost and Network Limits of Space-Based AI Compute

    cs.DC 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    Orbital laser-mesh networks have ~10,000x less bisection bandwidth than terrestrial Clos networks, making LEO training of frontier LLMs 100x+ more expensive while single-satellite inference remains plausible.

  10. Think Before You Grid-Search: Floor-First Triage for LLM Serving

    cs.PF 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    A five-dimensional resource-vector floor model computes latency bounds and capacity walls for LLM serving, predicting when TP16 or EP16+DP attention layouts dominate based on operating point.

  11. Think Before You Grid-Search: Floor-First Triage for LLM Serving

    cs.PF 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    LLM serving should triage by five-resource analytical floors and wall ordering, not grid search; on 16×H20, TP16 is capacity-capped at ~70 while EP+DP attention reaches ~644 concurrent 8K requests.

  12. ResonatorLM: Causal Resonant Field Mixing for Efficient Long-Context Language Modeling

    cs.CL 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    A physics-inspired damped-resonator mixer replaces attention and, at 6M parameters, improves WikiText accuracy while delivering growing long-context train/prefill/decode speedups versus a matched transformer.

  13. Design-CP: Context Parallelism for Design of Protein Nanoparticles

    cs.LG 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    Context-parallel inference for RFdiffusion 3 enables end-to-end all-atom design of large symmetric protein nanoparticles on multi-GPU hardware without retraining.

  14. A Systematic Approach to Multi-Agent AI from Advanced Regulatory Control Theory: Safe and Auditable LLM Operator Agents for Process Control

    eess.SY 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    ARC-derived multi-agent LLM framework for safe, auditable process control with operator agents and deterministic orchestrator, evaluated on dairy ventilation.

  15. GRINQH: Graded Input-based Quantization Hierarchy for Efficient LLM Generation

    cs.LG 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    GRINQH introduces a graded input-based quantization hierarchy that dynamically assigns multi-precision weights using activation magnitudes as importance proxy, unifying quantization with sparsification to improve LLM ...

  16. HyperQuant: A Rate-Distortion-Optimal Quantization Pipeline for Large Language and Diffusion Models

    cs.LG 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    HyperQuant unifies Hadamard transform, optimal lattice quantization, and entropy coding to outperform prior schemes on LLM weight and KV cache quantization down to 1.7 bits per scalar while preserving quality on a 19B...

  17. Length Value Model: Scalable Value Pretraining for Token-Level Length Modeling

    cs.CL 2026-04 conditional novelty 6.0

    LenVM trains a token-level value head to predict discounted remaining length, enabling length control and efficiency steering on LLMs and VLMs.

  18. Length Value Model: Scalable Value Pretraining for Token-Level Length Modeling

    cs.CL 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    LenVM models token-level remaining generation length as a bounded discounted value function derived from constant negative per-token rewards, providing a scalable proxy for generation horizon.

  19. DeepStack: Scalable and Accurate Design Space Exploration for Distributed 3D-Stacked AI Accelerators

    cs.AR 2026-04 conditional novelty 6.0

    DeepStack introduces a fast performance model and hierarchical search method for co-optimizing 3D DRAM stacking, interconnects, and distributed scheduling in AI accelerators, delivering up to 9.5x throughput gains ove...

  20. Benchmarking Compound AI Applications for Hardware-Software Co-Design

    cs.DC 2026-03 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Introduces a benchmarking suite for compound AI applications to support cross-stack performance, cost, and resource analysis for hardware-software co-design.

  21. Incremental Transformer Neural Processes

    cs.LG 2026-02 conditional novelty 6.0

    A causally masked, KV-cached Transformer Neural Process (incTNP) updates its context in linear time and matches or exceeds standard TNP accuracy on tabular and weather-stream benchmarks.

  22. Generating Counterfactual Patient Timelines from Real-World Data

    cs.LG 2026-01 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    An autoregressive generative model trained on large-scale real-world patient data generates clinically plausible counterfactual trajectories that reproduce known patterns in COVID-19 simulations.

  23. Tree Training: Accelerating Agentic LLMs Training via Shared Prefix Reuse

    cs.LG 2025-11 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Tree Training serializes tree trajectories via DFS and uses redundancy-free partitioning to compute weighted per-token losses exactly once per token, achieving up to 6.2x training speedup on dense and MoE models.

  24. From Tokens to Layers: Redefining Stall-Free Scheduling for MoE Serving with Layered Prefill

    cs.LG 2025-10 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Layered prefill replaces token-chunked prefill with layer-group interleaving in MoE models, cutting TTFT by up to 70%, end-to-end latency by 41%, and per-token energy by 22% while preserving stall-free TBT.

  25. Efficient Streaming Language Models with Attention Sinks

    cs.CL 2023-09 accept novelty 6.0

    StreamingLLM lets finite-window LLMs generalize to infinite-length sequences by retaining initial-token KV states as attention sinks, enabling stable streaming inference up to 4M tokens.

  26. H$_2$O: Heavy-Hitter Oracle for Efficient Generative Inference of Large Language Models

    cs.LG 2023-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    H2O evicts non-heavy-hitter tokens from the KV cache using a dynamic submodular policy, retaining recent and frequent-co-occurrence tokens to reduce memory while preserving accuracy.

  27. GQA: Training Generalized Multi-Query Transformer Models from Multi-Head Checkpoints

    cs.CL 2023-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Uptraining multi-head transformer checkpoints to grouped-query attention models achieves near multi-head quality at multi-query inference speeds using 5% additional compute.

  28. KAP: Bridging the Knowledge Selection-Runtime Consumption Gap in LLM Systems

    cs.LG 2026-07 conditional novelty 5.0

    KAP compiles structured knowledge priors into runtime access plans that cut proposal-time KV access to 5.5% at 128K while matching full-context QA quality and yielding up to 1.19× decode throughput.

  29. Efficient Clustering with Provable Guardrails for LLM Inference at Scale

    cs.LG 2026-07 conditional novelty 5.0

    Mini-Batch K-Means followed by greedy set-cover within each bucket guarantees every sample lands with a representative that is at least α-similar and attribute-identical, reducing LLM inference cost ~50× at 38M-custom...

  30. GPU Acceleration of Sparse Fully Homomorphic Encrypted DNNs

    cs.CR 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Sparse FHE matrix multiplication on AMD GPUs via FIDESlib achieves 3x CPU speedup and shifts complexity from cubic to semi-linear.

  31. Attention Residuals

    cs.CL 2026-03 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Attention Residuals replaces fixed residual summation with input-dependent softmax attention over preceding layers, and a blocked variant is shown to improve uniformity and downstream performance in a 48B-parameter mo...

  32. Speculative Decoding Across Languages

    cs.CL 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    N-gram draft models give larger and more consistent speed-ups for multilingual speculative decoding than fine-tuned neural drafts, despite lower acceptance rates, across translation and story generation.

  33. Training LLMs on HPC Systems: Best Practices from the OpenGPT-X Project

    cs.DC 2025-04 unverdicted novelty 2.0

    Engineering report detailing HPC infrastructure, software choices, and performance measurements for training a 7B LLM using 3D parallelism on JUWELS Booster.