arXiv Machine Learning

FlashLoop: Fast and Memory-Efficient Looped Transformers via Lazy Updates

FlashLoop is a training‑free inference framework for Looped Transformers that reduces cross‑loop redundancy by employing token‑sparse updates, sparse attention, and KV‑residual quantization. It exploits observations that, as loops progress, state changes concentrate on a small token subset, attention differences are dominated by a sparse key subset, and KV residuals become amenable to low‑bit quantization. The method achieves lossless accuracy with up to 1.64× speedup and 6× KV‑cache memory reduction across several Looped Transformer models.

arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 8

ResidualQuant: KV Cache Quantization for Looped Transformers with 2-Bit Residuals

ResidualQuant introduces a 2‑bit residual quantization scheme for KV caches in looped Transformers, leveraging the similarity of KV states across loops. By using the final‑loop KV states as a reference and applying least‑square scaling, rotations, and loop‑wise mixed precision, the method achieves accurate quantization down to INT2. Experiments on various looped Transformer models show that ResidualQuant improves the accuracy‑memory tradeoff, retaining near BF16 accuracy while reducing KV storage by 80.7% and boosting decode throughput and batch size on an RTX 5090.

By Heejun Kim, Junyoung Lee, SangLyul Cho, Dongsu Han, Insu Han, Sehoon Kim
arXiv AI
Aug 11

Full-bandwidth transformer

arXiv:2608. 08888v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autoregressive transformers compute along two axes: horizontally across generated tokens, and vertically through model depth.

By Xi Wang, Ziyang Cai, Zheng Zhan, Harry Dong, Ying Fan, Gustavo de Rosa, Tim Pearce, John Langford
arXiv AI
Oct 31

How to Loop Your Transformer: Loop Scaling, Specialization, and Parallel Inference

The paper investigates how looping—reusing transformer weights to deepen models without adding parameters—affects performance under different constraints. Experiments on dense decoder‑only transformers up to 1 B parameters show that looping the full transformer yields best quality for a fixed parameter budget, while looping a middle block is preferable when training FLOPs are limited. Adding loop‑specific low‑rank adapters improves quality, but decoding slows linearly with loops; a parallel loop design that passes hidden states across token positions can mitigate this slowdown, though careful handling of token embeddings is needed to retain gains.

By Chanakya Ekbote, Artidoro Pagnoni, Devendra Singh Sachan, Shruti Bhosale, Mike Lewis, Maryam Fazel-Zarandi, Shashank Rajput, Sujan Kumar Gonugondla
arXiv AI
Oct 19

TRACE: Transformer Residual Activation Codebook Encoding for Communication-efficient Distributed Edge Inference

The paper introduces TRACE, a framework that embeds a Vector Quantizer at the post‑attention residual of each Transformer layer, enabling exchanged activations to be encoded as compact codebook indices. During inference, receivers recover key/value representations via table lookup, eliminating downstream computation and allowing communication–computation overlap. A hierarchical codebook further permits runtime bitrate adaptation, and experiments on ViT‑Base and ViViT‑B demonstrate up to 1.89% accuracy gain, 1.27× speedup, and a 22,624× reduction in communication overhead compared to uncompressed inference.

By Muhammad Azlan Qazi, Alexandros Iosifidis, Qi Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 16

LLM Inference in a Flash!

The paper "LLM Inference in a Flash!" proposes an integer‑only quantization scheme and a dictionary‑based KV cache compression technique to enable large language model inference on compute‑in‑flash (CIF) devices. By eliminating floating‑point operations and reducing KV cache traffic through sparse dictionary coding, the authors achieve minimal accuracy loss while cutting dynamic KV cache traffic by 15× on Llama‑3.1‑8B and Qwen‑2.5‑7B models.

By Sebastian Zhao, Minseo Kim, Coleman Hooper, Luca Manolache, Michael W. Mahoney, Yakun Sophia Shao, Kurt Keutzer, Amir Gholami
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 3

Decoding Looped Transformers Better for (Almost) Free

The paper introduces LoopCD, a training‑free contrastive decoding framework that improves token selection in Loop‑Transformer models by comparing the final prediction with earlier recurrent passes. LoopCD operates either in logit space (LoopCD‑Logits) with a single extra output pass or in hidden‑state space (LoopCD‑Hidden) with no output overhead. Across multiple looped Transformer families, LoopCD yields significant performance gains—raising pass@1 scores on tasks such as AIME 2024 and HumanEval—while enabling a reduction in the number of recurrent loops and a corresponding decrease in inference FLOPs.

By Weihao Liu, Huangjie Zheng, Tianrong Chen, Rohit Dilip, Richard He Bai, Yizhu Jiao, Yuyang Wang, Ruixiang Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 28

LSTM-Style Looped Transformers with Shared KV Caches

The paper introduces an LSTM-style transformer that shares a single key–value cache across its recurrent core, reducing parameters by 40.4% compared to an untied model while keeping forward FLOPs similar. It aligns parallel and continuation training passes with a consistency loss, eliminating 81–89% of the continuation‑loss penalty on FineWeb. Experiments across multiple widths and token budgets show that weight tying incurs the smallest loss cost at lower token budgets, highlighting its potential for data‑ and storage‑constrained settings.

By Andreas Kirsch