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Juuso Korhonen

Publications and source records attributed to Juuso Korhonen.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

Fused-Softmax for efficient quantized attention

Low-precision matrix throughput on modern GPUs is growing far faster than vector-arithmetic throughput. Attention therefore cannot realize the available GEMM performance because softmax has become the pipeline bottleneck. We introduce Fused-Softmax Attention, a training-free algorithm that reformulates and approximates softmax to fold its dominant operations into the attention GEMMs, moving work from vector units to matrix cores. Implemented for the AMD CDNA 4 architecture, our MXFP8, MXFP6 and MXFP4 kernels reach approximately 3.0, 4.0 and 4.6 PFLOP/s on an AMD Instinct MI355X GPU, yielding speedups of $2.1\times$, $2.8\times$ and $3.2\times$ over the BF16 attention. Importantly, the additional error introduced by Fused-Softmax remains below the error floor set by quantizing the GEMM operands. On Wan2.2-T2V-A14B, a hybrid MXFP6/4 schedule delivers up to $2.05\times$ end-to-end speedup while preserving the visual quality of the outputs. The kernels ship in AMD's open-source AITER library, and they powered AMD's MLPerf Inference v6.1 Wan2.2 submission, which ran $1.7\times$ faster than AMD's previous-round result on the same hardware. Our results show that redesigning softmax to utilize the matrix pipeline enables attention to capitalize on continued growth in low-precision matrix throughput.

cs.AI↗

Efficient NeRF Optimization -- Not All Samples Remain Equally Hard

We propose an application of online hard sample mining for efficient training of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF). NeRF models produce state-of-the-art quality for many 3D reconstruction and rendering tasks but require substantial computational resources. The encoding of the scene information within the NeRF network parameters necessitates stochastic sampling. We observe that during the training, a major part of the compute time and memory usage is spent on processing already learnt samples, which no longer affect the model update significantly. We identify the backward pass on the stochastic samples as the computational bottleneck during the optimization. We thus perform the first forward pass in inference mode as a relatively low-cost search for hard samples. This is followed by building the computational graph and updating the NeRF network parameters using only the hard samples. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we apply our method to Instant-NGP, resulting in significant improvements of the view-synthesis quality over the baseline (1 dB improvement on average per training time, or 2x speedup to reach the same PSNR level) along with approx. 40% memory savings coming from using only the hard samples to build the computational graph. As our method only interfaces with the network module, we expect it to be widely applicable.

cs.CV↗