arXiv Machine Learning

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.

arXiv AI
Aug 18

FluxBin: Flexible LUT-based Ultra-low-bit LLM Inference by Algorithm-Kernel Synergy

arXiv:2608. 15602v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While binary quantization theoretically promises extreme compression and acceleration for Large Language Models (LLMs), existing research often overlooks the necessity of specialized hardware kernels, thus failing to unleash the full acceleration potential due to persistent reliance on expensive floating-point arithmetic or runtime dequantization overheads.

By Qingyao Yang, Runming Yang, He Xiao, Wendong Xu, Junyu Chen, Haobo Liu, Chenchen Ding, Ruihan Hu, Yik-Chung Wu, Ngai Wong
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 20

FlashAttention for Scalable Vector Architectures

FlashAttention-V is a blocked FlashAttention implementation optimized for scalable vector architectures, designed to reduce the memory bandwidth bottleneck of transformer attention on CPUs. By fusing operations, exploiting parallelism across attention heads, and inter‑head packing, it improves vector register utilization and memory locality, enabling efficient scaling from short to very long vectors. Benchmarks on TinyLlama, Llama 3.2, Qwen2.5, and Pythia‑410M show 22×–42× speedups over scalar FlashAttention in prefill and 8×–11× in decode on a Banana Pi BPI‑F3, while also revealing quantization‑related bottlenecks that limit long‑vector scalability.

By Sonia Rani Gupta, Nikela Papadopoulou, Miquel Peric\`as