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Computer Science > Machine Learning

arXiv:2408.04093 (cs)
[Submitted on 7 Aug 2024]

Title:Tree Attention: Topology-aware Decoding for Long-Context
Attention on GPU clusters

Authors:Vasudev Shyam, Jonathan Pilault, Emily Shepperd, Quentin
Anthony, Beren Millidge
View a PDF of the paper titled Tree Attention: Topology-aware
Decoding for Long-Context Attention on GPU clusters, by Vasudev Shyam
and 4 other authors
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    Abstract:Self-attention is the core mathematical operation of
    modern transformer architectures and is also a significant
    computational bottleneck due to its quadratic complexity in the
    sequence length. In this work, we derive the scalar energy
    function whose gradient computes the self-attention block, thus
    elucidating the theoretical underpinnings of self-attention,
    providing a Bayesian interpretation of the operation and linking
    it closely with energy-based models such as Hopfield Networks.
    Moreover, due to this formulation, we discover that we can use
    efficient and optimized automatic-differentiation techniques to
    derive a highly efficient Tree Attention algorithm to compute the
    gradient of the energy and hence self-attention. Our formulation
    reveals that the reduction across the sequence axis can be
    efficiently computed in parallel through a tree reduction. Our
    algorithm, for parallelizing attention computation across
    multiple GPUs, enables cross-device decoding to be performed
    asymptotically faster (up to 8x faster) than alternative
    approaches such as Ring Attention, while also requiring
    significantly less communication volume and incurring 2x less
    peak memory. Our code is publicly available here: \url{this https
    URL}

Subjects: Machine Learning (cs.LG); Computation and Language (cs.CL)
Cite as:  arXiv:2408.04093 [cs.LG]
          (or arXiv:2408.04093v1 [cs.LG] for this version)
          https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2408.04093
          Focus to learn more
          arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Jonathan Pilault [view email]
[v1] Wed, 7 Aug 2024 21:16:55 UTC (1,999 KB)
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    Decoding for Long-Context Attention on GPU clusters, by Vasudev
    Shyam and 4 other authors
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