Skip to yearly menu bar Skip to main content


Poster
in
Workshop: ES-FoMo II: 2nd Workshop on Efficient Systems for Foundation Models

Optimised Grouped-Query Attention Mechanism for Transformers

Yuang Chen · Cheng Zhang · Xitong Gao · Robert Mullins · George Constantinides · Yiren Zhao


Abstract:

Grouped-query attention (GQA) has been widely adopted in LLMs to mitigate the complexity of multi-head attention (MHA). To transform an MHA to a GQA, neighbour queries in MHA are evenly split into groups where each group shares the value and key layers. In this work, we propose AsymGQA, an activation-informed approach to asymmetrically grouping an MHA to a GQA for better model performance.Our AsymGQA outperforms the GQA within the same model size budget. For example, AsymGQA LLaMA-2-7B has an accuracy increase of 7.5\% on MMLU compared to neighbour grouping. Our approach addresses the GQA’s trade-off problem between model performance and hardware efficiency.

Chat is not available.