arXiv Machine Learning

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.

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 Computation and Language
Sep 23

Flash-dLLM: IO-Aware KV Caching and Parallel Decoding for Fast, Memory-Efficient Diffusion LLMs

Flash-dLLM is a training‑free inference acceleration framework that improves the speed and memory efficiency of Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs). It tackles GPU memory I/O bottlenecks by introducing an I/O‑aware fused KV‑cache kernel and then employs a draft‑and‑verify decoding strategy that uses the dLLM itself as both drafter and verifier. Experiments on mathematical reasoning and code‑generation tasks show Flash‑dLLM outperforms existing acceleration methods, achieving up to 11.0× speedups over the Elastic‑Cache baseline.

By Quan Nguyen-Tri, Mukul Ranjan, Zhiqiang Shen
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 25

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.

By Wanqi Yang, Shiwei Liu
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 AI
Sep 2

Faster Than Flash: Exploiting Attention Sparsity for Efficient Long-Context Decoding

The paper introduces Faster Flash Decoding (FFD), a hardware‑algorithm co‑design that fuses the selector and computation into a single kernel to eliminate memory‑bandwidth bottlenecks in long‑context decoding. By replacing metadata indices with low‑bit quantized, content‑aware scanning and employing a top‑delta strategy for dynamic block filtering, FFD achieves up to 11.6× kernel‑level speedup and scales to 256K context length while preserving model accuracy. The approach is training‑free, plug‑and‑play, and demonstrates significant throughput gains on benchmarks such as RULER and LongBench.

By Zhigeng Liu, Zhiyuan Ning, Ruixiao Li, Xiaoran Liu, Yuerong Song, Min Zhang, Ziwei He, Xipeng Qiu
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 4

Nova: An End-to-End MLIR Compiler for Deep Learning

arXiv:2608. 00029v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The performance of deep learning models at scale relies heavily on how effectively high-level mathematical operations are mapped to underlying physical hardware.

By Adwaid Suresh, Aparna A, Harshini V M, Jona Delcy C A, Killi Uma Maheswara Rao, Ram Charan Golla, Surendra Vendra
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 11

RotaryQuant: Fitting 120B MoE Models on Consumer Hardware via Fused Compressed-Space Attention

arXiv:2608. 08081v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large mixture-of-experts (MoE) language models with 26--120 billion parameters exceed the memory capacity of consumer devices through three simultaneous pressures: resident weight matrices, key-value (KV) cache state that grows linearly with context, and dozens of expert sublayers that must be paged on demand.

By Anthony. Lui, Mohamed. Elsaied, N. P. Savani