Memory-Efficient Attention Algorithms: Flash Attention, xFormers, and Beyond
The attention mechanism sits at the heart of modern transformers, enabling models to weigh the importance of different input elements when processing sequences. Yet this powerful mechanism comes with a significant cost: memory consumption that scales quadratically with sequence length. For a sequence of 8,192 tokens, standard attention requires storing an 8,192 × 8,192 attention … Read more