#transformers
2 papers
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inspiration
Flash Attention Is an IO Problem
Standard attention is slow not because of arithmetic — it is slow because of memory traffic. Flash Attention solves the IO problem, not the compute problem. That distinction matters for how you think about every inference optimization that follows.
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inspiration
Attention Sinks: The Tokens That Hold Everything Together
Transformers quietly route a disproportionate share of attention to their first tokens — not because those tokens are important, but because softmax needs somewhere to put mass. Understanding this changes how you think about KV cache design.