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arXiv · 2105.04779

EL-Attention: Memory Efficient Lossless Attention for Generation

Yu Yan·Jiusheng Chen·Weizhen Qi·Nikhil Bhendawade·Yeyun Gong·Nan Duan·Ruofei Zhang
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Abstract

Transformer model with multi-head attention requires caching intermediate results for efficient inference in generation tasks. However, cache brings new memory-related costs and prevents leveraging larger batch size for faster speed. We propose memory-efficient lossless attention (called EL-attention) to address this issue. It avoids heavy operations for building multi-head keys and values, cache for them is not needed. EL-attention constructs an ensemble of attention results by expanding query while keeping key and value shared. It produces the same result as multi-head attention with less GPU memory and faster inference speed. We conduct extensive experiments on Transformer, BART, and GPT-2 for summarization and question generation tasks. The results show EL-attention speeds up existing models by 1.6x to 5.3x without accuracy loss.

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Yu Yan, Jiusheng Chen, Weizhen Qi, Nikhil Bhendawade, Yeyun Gong, Nan Duan, Ruofei Zhang. 2021-05-11. EL-Attention: Memory Efficient Lossless Attention for Generation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.04779

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