arXiv AI

ERASE: EaRly bAckpropagation SchEdule for Faster Training of Modern Recommendation Systems

The paper introduces ERASE, a training schedule that detaches subgraphs in a neural network to launch their backward passes early on separate CUDA streams, thereby overlapping backward and forward computations. By applying this technique to a lightweight transformer and a large‑scale click‑through‑rate model, the authors demonstrate up to a 9.51% increase in training throughput while maintaining performance metrics close to the baseline.

arXiv Machine Learning
5d ago

QUILT: Rethinking Sparse-Attention Prefill through Shared Query Execution

The paper introduces QUILT, a new sparse‑attention execution mechanism that jointly processes neighboring queries to reuse shared key‑value (KV) entries, thereby reducing redundant memory traffic and computation. QUILT employs Shift‑and‑Compare Set Decomposition (SCSD) to convert irregular set operations into regular data‑parallel primitives and pipelines this with attention computation to hide overhead. The approach includes cascaded sharing across multiple granularities and a tile‑aware strategy that balances sharing with hardware utilization, achieving up to 55.1% lower kernel latency and 36.8% faster time‑to‑first‑token on LongBench benchmarks with negligible accuracy loss.

By Zhenduo Zhao, Qihui Zhou, Mingcong Song, Zhiyi Chen, Chuangguan Ye, Fengfan Hou, Zequn Gong, Jing Li, Hongjie Si, Guoping Long
arXiv Machine Learning
5d ago

PageWeaver: KV-Guided Query Unions for Sparse Attention

PageWeaver introduces a KV‑guided query union strategy for sparse attention, assembling query groups based on selected‑page affinity while preserving each query’s support and output ownership. The design employs a bounded GPU search to generate query IDs and an ID‑aware two‑CTA kernel that consumes them without materializing reordered Q tensors or cross‑page partial outputs. Experiments on the H200 Union8 with FP8 KV show a 1.70× speedup over FlashInfer, with additional latency reductions of 3.26–7.66% on selected captures and modest throughput gains for whole‑model prefill.

By Zhiyuan Li, Zihan Li, Zefang Yuan, Lei Wang, Hao Wang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

FlashBoB: I/O-Efficient Exact Backward-over-Backward for Softmax Attention

FlashBoB introduces an I/O‑efficient algorithm for exact backward‑over‑backward (BoB) in softmax attention, enabling precise second‑order differentiation without large intermediate tensors. By exploiting a hierarchical affine structure, the method confines computation to on‑chip tiles and limits off‑chip memory traffic, achieving θ(N² d²/M) HBM usage. Experiments show FlashBoB scales to sequence lengths of 262K on a single A100 GPU, outperforming prior exact baselines and FlashBack by up to 6.3×.

By Anthony Givans, Michael Crawshaw, Mingrui Liu
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 AI
Jun 19

StreamKL: Fast and Memory-Efficient KL Divergence for Boosting Attention Distillation

arXiv:2606. 20005v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Attention distillation, which trains one attention distribution to match another by minimizing their Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, is widely used in knowledge distillation, model compression, continual learning, and sparse-attention LLM training.

By Guangda Liu, Yiquan Wang, Chengwei Li, Wenhao Chen, Jing Lin, Yiwu Yao, Danning Ke, Wenchao Ding, Jieru Zhao
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 20

DualKV: Shared-Prompt Flash Attention for Efficient RL Training with Large Rollouts and Long Contexts

arXiv:2605. 15422v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Modern RL post-training methods such as GRPO and DAPO train on N response sequences of R tokens sampled from a shared prompt of P tokens, but standard FlashAttention replicates all P prompt tokens N times across both forward and backward passes -- duplicating compute and memory on identical hidden states.

By Jiading Gai, Shuai Zhang, Xiang Song, Bernie Wang, George Karypis