Efficient Attention Mechanisms for Large Language Models

The field of natural language processing is moving towards more efficient attention mechanisms for large language models. Recent research has focused on reducing the computational complexity of attention mechanisms, which is a major bottleneck in scaling up these models. Various approaches have been proposed, including sparse attention, sub-quadratic attention, and basis decomposition. These innovations have led to significant improvements in performance and efficiency, enabling the deployment of large language models on resource-constrained devices. Noteworthy papers in this area include ProxyAttn, which achieves up to 10.3x attention acceleration and 2.4x prefilling acceleration without significant performance loss. Another notable paper is Accelerating Attention with Basis Decomposition, which presents a lossless algorithmic reformulation of attention that achieves 32% faster key/value projections and 25% smaller weights. Sparse Query Attention is also a promising approach that reduces the computational complexity of attention mechanisms by decreasing the number of query heads, resulting in significant throughput improvements of up to 3x.

Sources

Lightweight Front-end Enhancement for Robust ASR via Frame Resampling and Sub-Band Pruning

ProxyAttn: Guided Sparse Attention via Representative Heads

Context-Driven Performance Modeling for Causal Inference Operators on Neural Processing Units

AMLA: MUL by ADD in FlashAttention Rescaling

PAT: Pattern-Perceptive Transformer for Error Detection in Relational Databases

The silence of the weights: an investigation of structural pruning strategies for attention-based audio signal architectures

Support Basis: Fast Attention Beyond Bounded Entries

Accelerating Attention with Basis Decomposition

Sparse Query Attention (SQA): A Computationally Efficient Attention Mechanism with Query Heads Reduction

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