January 22nd, 2025

Tensor Product Attention Is All You Need

The paper presents Tensor Product Attention (TPA), enhancing language model efficiency by reducing memory overhead and enabling longer sequence processing. The new T6 architecture outperforms standard Transformer models in various tasks.

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Tensor Product Attention Is All You Need

The paper titled "Tensor Product Attention Is All You Need" introduces a new attention mechanism called Tensor Product Attention (TPA) aimed at improving the efficiency of language models when handling longer input sequences. Traditional methods often require large key-value (KV) caches, leading to significant memory overhead during inference. TPA utilizes tensor decompositions to compactly represent queries, keys, and values, which reduces the size of the KV cache. By employing contextual low-rank components and integrating with Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE), TPA enhances both model quality and memory efficiency. The authors also present a new model architecture, the Tensor ProducT ATTenTion Transformer (T6), which outperforms standard Transformer baselines such as Multi-Head Attention (MHA) and others across various language modeling tasks. The empirical evaluations indicate that T6 achieves better performance metrics, including perplexity, while enabling the processing of longer sequences under fixed resource constraints. This advancement addresses a significant scalability challenge in modern language models. The code for the proposed methods is made available for further research and application.

- Tensor Product Attention (TPA) reduces memory overhead in language models.

- TPA integrates with Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) for improved efficiency.

- The Tensor ProducT ATTenTion Transformer (T6) outperforms standard Transformer models.

- T6 enables processing of longer sequences within fixed resource limits.

- The research addresses scalability challenges in modern language modeling.

AI: What people are saying
The comments on the article about Tensor Product Attention (TPA) reveal several common themes and critiques regarding the paper and its title.
  • Many commenters express frustration with the trend of overly simplistic or misleading paper titles, suggesting alternatives for clarity.
  • There is confusion regarding the relationship between memory consumption and parameter growth in relation to sequence length.
  • Some users highlight the limitations of the paper, noting that it addresses memory efficiency but not decoding speed for longer context windows.
  • Concerns are raised about the computational complexity associated with tensor decomposition in the context of the proposed method.
  • Several comments reflect a general annoyance with the repetitive use of phrases like "X is all you need" in academic titles.
Link Icon 12 comments
By @carbocation - 3 months
My kingdom for renaming this paper to something like "Tensor Product Attention is a Memory-Efficient Approach for Long-Sequence Language Modeling"
By @bbcc90 - 3 months
(trying to move the critique beyond the title...)

When trying to deploy llms in with larger context windows constrained environments 2 things start to hurt: a) increased memory footprint for longer KV cache b) increased decode speed due to longer context window. this paper addresses a) only, which is useful, but we are still left with b) (right?)

By @whymauri - 3 months
I really can't with these paper titles anymore, man.
By @esafak - 3 months
Tensor decomposition has traditionally suffered from high computational complexity. Is it an issue here?
By @jdefr89 - 3 months
Every day there are literally tons of papers with “XYX is All you need” at this point we apparently need thousands of things…
By @hangonhn - 3 months
For those of us who are lay people outside of machine learning and AI, what was the critical insight that made “attention all you need” in the original Transformer paper?
By @AxesPushPatty - 3 months
Another approach has been where separate physics-informed neural networks learned the tensor product. They reformulated the initial optimization problem to be structured as tensors. I assume that tensor products could be another factor in improving the actual computations.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.13101

By @cute_boi - 3 months
> a novel attention mechanism

Why do every paper has to mention this word "novel" and these titles are getting crazier day by day.

By @sva_ - 3 months
The main contribution of the paper aside, I have to say that the background section 2 is very neatly and succinctly written.
By @t_mann - 3 months
> Because memory consumption grows linearly with sequence length, the maximum context window is limited by practical hardware constraints

I thought the number of parameters grows quadratically with context window length - what do they mean?

By @joshdavham - 3 months
I'm sorry but can people please stop naming their papers "X is all you need"? It's super annoying.
By @thunkingdeep - 3 months
If you don’t pay to read papers, you don’t get to complain about the titles, imo.

I hate ads, but I’m not paying for YouTube Premium either. That’s how it goes. I get ads.