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arXiv · 2405.02842

IceFormer: Accelerated Inference with Long-Sequence Transformers on CPUs

Yuzhen Mao·Martin Ester·Ke Li
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Abstract

One limitation of existing Transformer-based models is that they cannot handle very long sequences as input since their self-attention operations exhibit quadratic time and space complexity. This problem becomes especially acute when Transformers are deployed on hardware platforms equipped only with CPUs. To address this issue, we propose a novel method for accelerating self-attention at inference time that works with pretrained Transformer models out-of-the-box without requiring retraining. We experiment using our method to accelerate various long-sequence Transformers, including a leading LLaMA 2-based LLM, on various benchmarks and demonstrate a greater speedup of 2.73x - 7.63x while retaining 98.6% - 99.6% of the accuracy of the original pretrained models. The code is available on our project website at https://yuzhenmao.github.io/IceFormer/.

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Yuzhen Mao, Martin Ester, Ke Li. 2024-05-05. IceFormer: Accelerated Inference with Long-Sequence Transformers on CPUs. https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.02842

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