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arXiv · 2407.15131

Token-Picker: Accelerating Attention in Text Generation with Minimized Memory Transfer via Probability Estimation

Junyoung Park·Myeonggu Kang·Yunki Han·Yanggon Kim·Jaekang Shin·Lee-Sup Kim
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Abstract

The attention mechanism in text generation is memory-bounded due to its sequential characteristics. Therefore, off-chip memory accesses should be minimized for faster execution. Although previous methods addressed this by pruning unimportant tokens, they fall short in selectively removing tokens with near-zero attention probabilities in each instance. Our method estimates the probability before the softmax function, effectively removing low probability tokens and achieving an 12.1x pruning ratio without fine-tuning. Additionally, we present a hardware design supporting seamless on-demand off-chip access. Our approach shows 2.6x reduced memory accesses, leading to an average 2.3x speedup and a 2.4x energy efficiency.

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Junyoung Park, Myeonggu Kang, Yunki Han, Yanggon Kim, Jaekang Shin, Lee-Sup Kim. 2024-07-21. Token-Picker: Accelerating Attention in Text Generation with Minimized Memory Transfer via Probability Estimation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.15131

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